


take as long as you need to take

by orphan_account



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Ambiguous Relationships, F/F, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2020-11-09 00:46:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20844773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Chloe stares, and stares, and stares into the deep and the dark of her eyes.It should scare her, then, the way her hand drifts unbidden toward Dana’s face. Ten years is too many. They became strangers years, and years, and years before ten. But. Suddenly her nails are ghosting along the path of Dana’s jaw, and maybe, actually, when Dana lets loose a breath that sounds like the stress of every last day apart finally being let go, she isn’t scared at all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Back on my bullshit writing about Chloe's relationships through the lens of her time with Rachel!
> 
> (back on my bullshit refusing to write Rachel as a villain in any capacity whatsoever!!!)

_There is, truly, something special hidden away inside moments like these. _

_Quiet, near silence but for the dull, distant hum of a fan the next room over. _

_The sounds of some daytime sitcom playing on TV, the waves of its jokes and its laughs rising and falling just one small notch past muted. _

_Breathing, slow, steady, and without the slightest hint of care toward any worries lurking beyond the walls. Beyond this bubble of peace and of silence._

_Tomorrow morning, the apartment will be empty. Tomorrow morning, Chloe_ _’s heart will have gone, and memories of days too far past to see again will spill in from the doors, and the windows, and the vents. From every last gap in sight to just barely half-fill that reopened space, as if the pale imitations that they are might ever be enough to fill her whole once again._

_Lopsided smirks and bright, hazel eyes. _

_Lips curled into smiles still stained in and outside the lines by too many glasses of cheap red wine. Dancing in the kitchen in the middle of the night. Strawberry blonde hair blocking out the world like a curtain, and laughter light enough to feel like flying; like soaring; like a weightless, weightless, something. _

_Orange blossom perfume. The gentle nighttime breeze. Stargazing at the beach. Home movies, home-cooked meals, and _home. _First moving in together after escaping childhoods of violence together, sharing a small twin mattress in an even smaller studio apartment, and, and,_

_And._

_Memories will never be enough. But hoping is, for the moment, free. _

_Maybe someday, time might cease to be fleeting, just for her._

_Chloe sighs, unsettling stray motes of dust in their journey through the rays of golden, evening light. The body beside her, above her, around her, stirs._

_Lips press gently to hers, the taste of herself still lingering faintly._

_“One month, Priceless,” their owner whispers through tears, a futile attempt at comfort riding on every letter. “One month.”_

_Chloe shuts her eyes._

_She breathes. _

_Nods._

_And she rolls them both over until _ _they're _ _tangled uselessly into sheets on some new corner of bed. Until they’re touching, palms cupping cheeks and lips everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, burying smiles into every last patch of skin as they laugh together like their tears aren’t still hiding in the edges of the day’s fading sun._

_“One month.”_

~*~

~*~

If Chloe was a betting woman, she might put some money on the vending machine lights holding enough power to make her go blind by the end of the day. They aren’t particularly bright, but. Still. She’d take that bet.

It’s a slow day.

It’s a good bet.

Especially given how long Luke has spent babying the break room coffeemaker. It broke hours ago, but he stuck himself in some sort of fretting loop and still refuses to come out. Or let her back in. Or fix the thing.

So in the absence of coffee, her options are to stay in the lobby with the water stains on the ceiling, the cracks in the tile, and most importantly, the fully functioning air conditioner as her company; to stare at the vending machine until her eyes dry into raisins, or, _or,_ she could shuffle out into the too-humid heat, into the middle of the garage, lie flat on her back, and stare up at the metal beams criss-crossing paths through the ceiling. Wait for some unwitting jackass to run her over while she busies herself searching for meaning in their patterns.

It’s an easy choice.

It’s an easier bet.

At least, it would have been. Had today not been _today._

It is, though. Today. The front door swings open, bell chime and all, and suddenly Chloe is scrambling to get out a “Welcome to Two Whales Auto Repair, I’ll be with ya in a sec,” as she shoves her hands into pockets and searches frantically for her wallet. As she rushes to look like she was only grabbing a drink and _definitely _not anything else. _Especially _not anything infinitely more depressing.

She takes her place at the front counter before anyone gets the chance to say otherwise.

“Hi,” the maybe-customer starts. Chloe doesn’t make eye contact, far too busy cracking open the can and almost immediately burying down a grimace at the taste — she bought the wrong kind, obviously — underneath a cursory scan of the shelves below the counter, and, “I’m parked just outside, and I was hoping — ”

Chloe’s eyes dart to the customer. The maybe-customer. She doesn’t really see, isn’t really looking. Other things first. “Hey, sorry, one sec,” she grumbles, leaving their problem hanging in the air as she cracks open the side door to the garage. Her target: an old, fraying denim jacket, is hanging on the opposite doorknob. Luke must’ve taken time out of his busy, busy schedule to bring it out of the break room.

Asshole.

“There you are. _Christ,_” Chloe hisses, shrugging it onto her shoulders in one second and freezing to a halt in the next because there is a _ghost_ in the lobby staring her straight in the eyes.

For a moment, a second, an instant, all there is, is the sound of time skidding to a crash. Of the world in reverse. Of Chloe’s heartbeat banging its way up toward her skull. And. Then. The door clicks back to closed. And Chloe can breathe. The door clicks back to closed, and suddenly Chloe is aware that she’s been standing in place with the hem of her work shirt hiked up to her waist and exposing just a bit too much tattooed skin to still be considered _professional, _so she lets her jacket fall completely to her shoulders, and, and, and,

The ghost, the customer, the maybe-customer furrows their brow into some expression that looks an awful lot like Chloe feels, then slowly, slowly, slowly, “Chloe,” they choke, and swallow, and recenter back to just slightly _off_-center. “_Chloe Price?_”

Chloe’s heart _flutters_ at the sound of her voice. At the sound of her name on those lips — soft, and gentle, and so perfectly scratchy — for the first time in what must be a decade, and it’s _insane_ how different she seems from the girl she knew all those years, and years, and years ago.

“Dana?” Chloe echoes, voice too small, too cracked, too broken at the edges.

Dana — Dana Ward, in all her vibrant, boundless glory — smiles.

Chloe’s breath hitches. It catches in her throat until it’s straining at the muscle and begging for escape, because even though it doesn’t quite bear repeating, her brain is caught on the point, running it back, and forth, and over, and over that this is _Dana Ward. _And, still, the Dana here, now, is almost a completely new person from the one she remembers. _That_ Dana was sunshine itself. Always smiling, always laughing, always looking for a chance to play the big sister to Chloe and her constant need for beer, or weed, or even just the company of someone a few years older. The company of someone who had been around just a few years longer and still saw Chloe as someone worth a damn. The company of someone who appreciated Chloe’s company every bit as much as Chloe appreciated theirs.

That Dana was an _angel._

And it shouldn’t be surprising, because ten years is _ten years, _and ten years is longer than a long time. But it _is. _And. This Dana — she’s not like anyone Chloe has ever met. Not since…

_Well_.

This Dana has a kind of sadness to her, an air of melancholy lingering around her even now, even in something as mundane as this, in the way she smiles through her recognition like she’s proud of the feeling itself, in the way she’s staring, and staring, and staring right back at Chloe like she isn’t quite ready to be sure what to think. But. She’s still steady. Still strong. Still shining, despite that dark shadow hidden just behind her back, threatening to crush it all into nothing.

No one deserves that sort of hurt. Least of all her.

“You look,” Dana exhales, eyes dragging with a bit too much intent to excuse as accidental over every inch of toned, tattooed skin Chloe still has in sight. “Holy _shit, _Chloe.”

And, maybe, Chloe takes some minuscule sense of pride in that. Hopeless childhood crush that even her girlfriend shared come back for a day to crush on _her. _

And, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s why she puts off fixing her shirt. Why she leans forward to balance her palms on the edge of the counter until her collar is hanging down, and loose, and revealing something else entirely for Dana to stare at.

Dana blushes. It looks better than Chloe could have ever imagined.

Take _that, _life.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” Chloe says, teeth bared in an open-mouthed smile at the sight of Dana finally, finally hitting her limit on eye contact for the interaction. Of Dana letting out a string of nervous, shaky laughs and redirecting her eyes off toward the vending machine on the other end of the room. The absence of attention gives Chloe an excuse to finally readjust the hem of her shirt.

Dana was always gorgeous back in Arcadia — deep blue eyes, and long, auburn hair, near always tied up in an effortlessly pristine ponytail, and curves, and curves, and curves, and she _knew_ what she looked like just like she made sure everyone else knew it, too — but the Dana in front of her now, right now… Chloe isn’t sure she could ever so much as _imagine_ words that might begin to scratch at being enough to describe her.

Her hair is shorter, shoulder length and wavy, and her eyes are darker in that indescribable way that things tend to go. Life happens, hurt happens, eyes grow darker. Depths grow deeper. But they aren’t _harder._ They aren’t any less welcoming, and oh, Chloe is impossibly thankful for that, and _oh,_ if she keeps reacting like this, Chloe wouldn’t mind dragging Dana off to some quiet corner of the building and falling headfirst into that blue. She’s wearing black heels, black dress slacks and a silky blouse the exact same shade as her eyes, unbuttoned at the chest in _exactly_ the way Chloe would’ve expected from her back then, right now, and it’s the thing that gets sets her mind just a little bit further on the track to thinking things entirely too inappropriate for a Monday afternoon at work.

“_Please,_” Dana says, sighs. “Look at you. I’m _old, _there’s no need for flattery.”

“Okay, first of all, you’re three years older than me, which means you’re… What, thirty-one?” Chloe asks, ducking her head and catching Dana’s eyes again. Dana nods, and so Chloe smirks, and maybe it starts Dana blushing all over again. All the old ghosts of old high school crushes coming out for revenge, today. “So yeah. Not old, then. And, second — second of all — what the fuck brings you to LA?”

Realization flashes over Dana’s eyes. She turns to glance of the windows at her car. Or. SUV, Chloe notes, when she follows Dana’s line of sight. Not a car, then. Dana drives an SUV. Dana is in LA, and she’s driving an old beat-up Toyota like some kind of soccer-mom-in-training.

There’s a joke in there Chloe doesn’t care enough to find. Something about past and present. Mirror images. Chloe crawling up from the shit and Dana falling right down into it.

One of those deeply existential sort of jokes that always feel more like puzzles than jokes.

“I — Car trouble,” Dana says faintly. One of Chloe’s eyebrows shoots up toward her hairline in answer, but before she can _ask, _Dana is whispering, “_Fuck, _I’m a mess,” and clearing her throat. She’s shutting her eyes, and breathing deep, and trying again all over again. Finding her way back to almost normal. “I’m sorry, Chloe, but I really do need to get this looked at.”

She sounds almost guilty.

So, Chloe laughs, and near shouts, “_Right,__”_ because she might have really let herself forget why Dana is _here. Here,_ here. She laughs, and she smiles, and she slides out from behind the counter just a bit too gracefully for Dana’s good, and the exact right amount of gracefully for her own. “What’s the problem?”

It shuts Dana down like she never made it back at all. Sends her back toward nerves, and blushing, and avoiding eye contact, and Chloe is thriving on every last inch of it because it is truly, truly, truly every last thing she could have hoped to get out of this pettiest of revenges.

“_Lord,_” Dana whispers, and then she doesn’t.

Chloe doesn’t exactly listen to her explanation, but she also doesn’t _not,_ so much of her attention already caught up in Dana that she catches the broad strokes without even trying. It’s enough to know: a dying battery.

Probably.

It could be that, or one of about eight other things if it isn’t.

It’s probably the battery.

By the time Chloe shouts Luke out of the break room and up to the front to cover for her; by the time she’s outside with Dana and taking a real look under the hood — putting on too much of a show because _finally _being able to watch Dana turn red, red, and redder on the smallest of whims just like Dana used to do to her is an exquisite sort of something that Chloe isn’t remotely ready to give up — she manages to confirm as much.

And, when she’s got Dana safely back in the driver’s seat and prepared to pull into the garage, she barely takes note of the voice coming from the back seat because Dana asks, “Was it really okay to yell at him like that?” her voice dropped low, a conspiratorial sort of whisper like Luke wouldn’t start cracking up at the idea of Chloe ever bothering with _manners_ around him.

Dana asks, and Chloe laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

~*~

“Congratulations, asshole,” Chloe singsongs, leaning over the counter and poking Luke square on the forehead. “Your reward for hiding in the back all day — ”

Luke scoffs and smirks that insufferable smirk of his. Teeth too white. Face too calm. He runs a tanned hand through his hair — short, black, thick enough to stand up without product whenever he isn’t busy hiding it under one of his many, many baseball caps — like Chloe came anywhere close and like even the _idea_ warrants a touch-up. “I wasn’t _hiding,_ I was _fixing._”

“Last I checked, fixing a coffeemaker didn’t involve demanding I leave the room so you could hold vigil and pray to the gods of technology,” Chloe says. She shoves her finger at his forehead again. Harder, this time.

Whether or not feigning irritation harder is even possible, Luke tries for it: leaning back without really leaning, hand flat on his chest, and a small, subtle shake of the head like Chloe rocked his entire world. And, then, as easily as it comes, it’s gone, and he’s slid his way back to smug. “You know,” he says, smiling, smiling, smiling again as he leans back over the counter and all the way into Chloe’s personal space. “A couple geniuses like us? I bet we could think of a few more entertaining ways for you to use that finger.”

The doorbell rings.

“Oh.” Dana. Of course. _Timing._ “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

Chloe shoves her finger at Luke’s head one last time, hard enough to send him stumbling back by one step and then two. “Not at all, this jackass just likes to flirt because he knows I hate men.”

“Guilty,” he says. He sounds anything but.

He looks over and smiles, disarming, and charming, and about nine other synonyms that Chloe might have ready to go if she owned a thesaurus. “She’s just so fun to get riled up, you know? I bet you know. You have a look. Like you know.”

“Don’t answer that,” Chloe says, because _god_ he is infuriating. Sometimes. Most times. It’s hard to place where he is, this time. “Now, go, go, go. Battery needs replacing. Fix _something_ today before my finger turns into a fist.”

“Kinky. Fine though, have it your way, sweetheart,” he smirks, and he leaves.

“_Dick._”

A roll of her eyes later, the door has swung shut, and Chloe is left taking a deep, deep breath.

Take two.

“Sorry about that. He’s a good friend when it matters, he’s just,” she waves a limp arm toward the garage and slips back behind the counter, “Like _that_ the rest of the time. Anyway. Let’s get you all paid up before he starts getting notions about his chances with you.”

For a short, short second, Dana hesitates, thoughts clearly stuck somewhere between concerned and entertained. Bouncing helplessly back and forth. Back and forth.

But.

Chloe catches her eyes. And it gets her smiling again. Leveled out and grounded back inside the walls of the moment. She steps up to the counter.

And, that’s when Chloe sees it. Him. The kid hiding behind Dana’s leg, same wavy auburn hair, cut in the closest approximation of a crew cut anyone has ever managed on a toddler, and even the same blue eyes. One of his hands is gripped tight at the fabric of Dana’s slacks as he peeks out from his hiding place at Chloe.

“Oh.” Chloe puts on a softer voice, thankful to have not missed a beat. She hadn’t seen a ring on Dana’s hand, but hey, things happen. Ten years is a lot of time for those things to happen. “Hey there, little man, where were you hiding?”

The kid shrinks away and out of sight at first — tries, anyway — but Dana seems to know it’s coming before it happens, because just as she moves to give Chloe her credit card, she’s sliding one step to the side and resting her free hand on his head. Reassuring him, “It’s okay, this is Chloe. She’s… She’s an old friend of Mommy’s.”

He seems to calm, at that.

At the idea that the tall, scary lady with the foul mouth, and the electric blue hair, the neck to toe tattoos, and the deep, graveled voice might be a _friend. _It even inspires him to meet her gaze head-on, to look her up and down until he’s furrowing his brow in concentration. Nodding, like he’s already sized her up. Already decided she’s perfectly harmless in no more than the time it took Chloe to get Dana completely checked out.

Chloe is leaning over the counter, weight balanced on folded arms, waiting and watching when he finally says, “I’m Trevor,” in a steady, steady voice.

Chloe throws a questioning glance in Dana’s direction at that, because there is _absolutely_ a story there, but she doesn’t give up an answer, just keeps deflecting things into the realm of small talk until the kid is distracted and Chloe is out from behind the counter. Until they’re all sat together in the cheap lobby chairs, talking in circles and waiting for Luke to finish his work. Deflecting around their mutual past and their personal presents in ways their particular brand of small talk never used to allow — _how have you been? Good, good, absolutely nothing bad has happened to me, ever, and you? Ah, same, same, that__’s so good to hear — _until the only thing either has managed to learn about the other is nothing at all.

Trevor, to his credit, seemed to realize the pointlessness of it all almost immediately. He checked out about two backs and forths in, right after Chloe rolled up her sleeves, and occupied himself fiddling with her bracelets and the hair ties wrapped around her wrists as he scanned over each and every detail on her forearms.

“_Can I see your drawings?_” He’d asked, all starstruck, childish innocence as Chloe raced to piece together what he meant.

What he meant, it turned out, was the tattoos. The heart at her throat, wings spread out from side to side with a knife stabbed straight through the middle. The knuckle stick and pokes she got when she was twenty. LADY LIKE written uneven and wobbly over each of her fingers. The old sleeve on her right arm that she’s had ever since she was eighteen, recently touched up and extended by the only artist she trusts enough to try. The skull at her shoulder, and the butterflies and flowers curling a path down to her wrist are still there, still right where they’ve always been, only, now surrounded by _more_. By greenery wrapping and snaking around every previously bare inch of skin until it all fades into a tangle of roots on the back of her palm.

That, and those, and the newer, matching piece she got on her left. No skulls, no butterflies on that, but flowers that have bloomed fully, and vines lined with thorns on their matching, spiraling path to an identical finish.

In the end, the thing that moves their small talk toward matters ever so slightly larger is Trevor getting distracted — as kids do when confronted with things shiny and new — by the sun glinting off the vape pen in Chloe’s breast pocket. He mistakes it for a video game, and Dana gives him and her both a set of questioning looks just as Luke shuffles back into the room. _To search for some misplaced tools, _he says.

Tools he absolutely does not need in order to replace a battery.

_Nosy._

“Oh, do you still smoke? I would’ve put money on Rachel talking you out of it years ago,” Dana asks then, something like disappointment lazing on the tip of her tongue. It gets a knowing chuckle from Luke, and Chloe doesn’t even get the chance to fathom the soul sinking feeling of dread building somewhere down near the pit of her stomach over the idea of explaining _that_ situation, because he’s rescuing her with a glance and a nod, embellishing details and talking himself up as _the hero who saved Chloe Price from the cigarette menace._

Chloe is, at the very least, thankful to know he still has her back. Even here. They’ve disagreed on how to solve _the situation _— just like they’ve taken to calling it that, a situation — often enough that she could very well have been left to flounder.

The option was there.

He could’ve taken it.

“This is the first time it’s so much as come up all month, it’s impressive,” he says, and Chloe is already back to their default, already back to wanting to smack the smug off his face. “Miss three-packs-a-day over there would never admit it, but she doesn’t actually use that thing more than once every few weeks. If you ask me, she just keeps it around to feel safe.”

Chloe huffs out of a noise of frustration and bites back with an, “Oh come on, I wasn’t _that_ bad.”

Only. The rebuttal falls on deaf ears. There isn’t anything left in the room but smiles on faces that know too, too well to ever consider believing her. Dana even reaches over and squeezes comfortingly at her shoulder. _I__’m proud of you,_ the touch says, and, well, Chloe can’t exactly find the right way to take issue with that.

“Three packs, sweetheart,” Luke says, turning to leave and tapping a wrench on the counter in victory like he ever actually planned to do anything but interrupt whatever this is, or whatever it might have been. Some frustrating drive to keep Chloe’s flirting _on_ the rails because he’s stumbled in on what happens when it stumbles off too many times to not.

But. She lets it be. She pulls herself back to herself until the fight is tucked safely away beneath her ribs.

She lets it be, and Dana chuckles fully, hand still holding just tight enough, and warm, warm, _warm _at her shoulder, thumb rubbing soothing little nothings that feel somehow like all of their evenings spent together back on the edges of the run-down little fishing town from their childhood. That shell of a place barely still clinging to life through nothing more than an invisible, inanimate sense of will while all of its children tried with each and every new day to build up the momentum to fling themselves free.

She lets it be, just like she leans back in her seat, sliding down ever so slightly and resting a hand over top of Dana’s in some gesture full of some emotion that she isn’t quite sure she wants to name. She runs the side of her thumb one way and the other, again and again over the back of Dana’s palm.

It might mean _thank you._ It might mean anything, really.

Rather than solve that mystery now, though, she pulls away, glancing down toward the other end of the lobby where Trevor seems to have drifted over the course of the last few minutes. He’s flitting slowly from side to side, pressing vending machine buttons like it might accomplish anything without money and bouncing just as determinedly over to the air fresheners and dollar knickknacks hung up on the opposite wall.

“You doin’ okay over there, little man?” she asks, pulling just short of a shout.

He pauses long enough to throw a thumbs up and reply with a blunt, “Yeah,” before returning to the puzzle he’s created for himself between the vending machine buttons

Chloe, maybe, just maybe, bites down a laugh.

“God, he _loves _you for that nickname, I’m never going to hear the end of it.” Dana’s hand, maybe, just maybe, still hasn’t moved. It maybe, maybe, _maybe_, is already back to work, petting and stroking, filling Chloe with still more of that unnamable sensation she’s felt building alongside the return of Dana’s confidence. Alongside her anxiety slowly giving way to the knowledge that Chloe is still Chloe. “I swear, he’s in such a rush to grow up lately.”

A short, raspy hum is Chloe’s only answer. She smiles. Meets Dana’s eyes. Studies every last detail she missed earlier, in her rapid-fire attempts to see her turn red, red, and redder like maybe she could bottle the feeling up for use whenever _normal_ becomes too normal to bear.

Dana blushes, just slightly, just barely, but her floundering is already long lost to the past of short minutes ago. Already too far gone to find, much less keep for herself.

“And you?” Chloe asks. Dana blinks. “Love me enough to let me get one real answer out of you?”

There is a small, minuscule, barely-more-than-a-blink sort of flash where Dana’s eyes dart over to her son, and Chloe can read the desire to _leave, leave, leave_ as clear as pen on paper. But Dana stays. She meets her gaze and mirrors her search over every last detail in her expression, hope already seeping in from the corners.

“Okay.” Dana’s expression softens almost imperceptibly.

Chloe’s question is balanced on the tip of her tongue, but she doesn’t ask. Not immediately. She stays caught in the current of Dana’s eyes. Bottomless as the ocean. Limitless as the sky. Minutes and hours, days, and weeks, and months, and years, all condensed down to less than the handful of seconds until she finally, finally does.

“What — what are you _really_ doing in LA?” The words come as barely more than a whisper, and Chloe’s knees start bouncing in tandem before she’s even asked the entire thing. Anxious, nervous movement screaming _leave, leave, leave_ because Dana _didn__’t_, and some unconscious part of her is already aware that Dana — the Dana she knew, or maybe the Dana of now, or maybe either, or both — would never deflect like she has without good reason, and it was a stupid idea to ask her at all.

The pause, she expects. The hand finally leaving her shoulder and taking every scrap of warmth with it, eyes closing, deep sighing, turning away to look out the window for some sort of anchor to the moment while she gathers up her strength. All of it.

The answer, however, she doesn’t.

“My dad died. Three months ago. He — In his will, he left me his bar. He owned a bar; did you know that? Dropped us like a sack of shit all those years ago and this is where he ended up. _Bar owner,_” Dana snorts. Shakes her head. The words seem to fit poorly in her mouth. “People _loved him_ here. And… Anyway. I’m sure you don’t need me reminding you what he was really like,” she chuckles bitterly, reaching back over to grasp at Chloe’s hand in that absentminded way she’s always had. A silent need for physical contact to act as her guide through the pitch dark of bad memories. It should be scarier, Chloe thinks, how easily they’ve slipped back into old habits. Ten years is a long time. Enough to forget what those old habits were. “This was only supposed to be for a few weeks while I got the place ready to sell, but I’ve — _three months,_ Chloe. We have a life here, now.”

“Nothing waiting for you back home?” Chloe asks. She already knows the answer. Dana wouldn’t leave if there was. Dana wouldn’t _stay_ if there was. She wouldn’t uproot a child’s entire life if there was.

As if to prove the point, Dana turns, just slightly, just barely, to watch her son, no doubt still finding new ways to occupy himself. Her hand flexes around Chloe’s. “No,” she says. “Nothing.” She plasters on a smile — rehearsed to such a point that Chloe, for a moment, almost believes it as real — and goes on, “He’s going to grow up without a father no matter where we are. There’s work here, at least.”

Chloe stares, and stares, and stares into the deep and the dark of her eyes.

It should scare her, then, the way her hand drifts unbidden toward Dana’s face. Ten years is too many. They became strangers years, and years, and years before ten. But. Suddenly her nails are ghosting along the path of Dana’s jaw, and maybe, actually, when Dana lets loose a breath that sounds like the stress of every last day apart finally being let go, she isn’t scared at all.

~*~

“You know,” Chloe says thoughtfully, head tilted to the side and the rest of her leaning against the driver’s side door of the SUV. She waits and watches for Dana to finish buckling up her son in the back before continuing. “I had the _biggest_ crush on you when I was a kid.”

Dana looks at her. _Really_ looks. One of those too-old stares that says she knows too much and sees too much and still, somehow, never let herself consider the obvious. “Right. Of course you did.”

And, well, maybe time and the direction its machinations have flung them both has something to do with it, too. But that doesn’t matter so much when Chloe is watching a part of her past she thought might never come back slowly fold itself up and prepare to leave once again. “I mean it,” she says, pushing off the door in time with Dana closing the other, and stepping close, close, closer. “Hot college girl acting friendly with me just because we happened to live in the same shithole? That was a _blessing_ for little baby Chloe.”

“There was more to it than that,” Dana tries, too quiet, too small.

“Was there, though?” Chloe asks. “Really? Like, _really?_ I was a little shit back then, you remember that, right? You were there.”

The smile cracking at the edges of Dana’s lips, and the laugh, and the way she averts her eyes, and all of it, all of it, every single part of it, are so thoroughly expected, so thoroughly Dana, that Chloe can’t help but let her own grin spread that much wider.

Before she realizes, she’s reaching over to stroke the pads of her fingers slowly down Dana’s forearm, and her voice, maybe, just maybe, drops to some ledge hanging just above a whisper when she says, “Really though. Dana, you were one of my best friends. I needed those like hell back then. _Anyone_ woulda been crushing on you in my position.”

Something in the air seems to crackle. It hums and buzzes with all the intensity of every instant before a spark, and maybe, if Chloe were feeling a little more careless, maybe, if Chloe hadn’t forced herself to consciousness through an entire can of overpriced energy drink over the past half hour, she would have let that crackle continue growing.

But she _isn__’t_ careless, and she _is_ awake, and so, she pulls herself back by a half step and more. Rubs her lips together. Smothers whatever expression she might have been wearing down to nothing and says, “By the way? You look incredible. Little Chloe’d die on the spot if she ever got to see this glow up.”

And, suddenly, Dana is staring deeper and deeper into her eyes. Nervous, still, in that way she hasn’t managed to shake, but happy and _her_ in a way that shoots straight to the center of Chloe’s heart and makes ten years of absence feel like no more than hours.

“Flatterer,” Dana says.

She makes a little half-movement toward the door at Chloe’s side, probably intending for that to be the end of it, but catches herself at the last second. She freezes, just slightly, just long enough, when she realizes Chloe isn’t moving. And. So. Chloe grabs gently, gently, too, too gently for her wrist. Wraps her fingers around the pulse point until she can feel it racing just beneath her fingers.

“Hold up.” She turns over Dana’s hand and takes a step closer. Searches for the pen hiding in one of her pockets.

She does find it. Eventually.

When she’s done, it feels like eternities have passed. When she’s done, Dana is studying her handiwork, brow drawn down in confusion until some corner cracks. And then another. And another. Another, another, and another.

“_Really?_” Dana asks through a tidal wave of laughter, teetering on the brink of doubling over and burying her face in Chloe’s shoulder. Held back by the years of well-rehearsed professionalism; that sense of adulthood that people tend to gain when they’re not Chloe. When they’re not working in some tiny auto shop in some nothing corner of the city of their dreams.

Finally, Chloe steps away from the door, and finally, Dana lets herself inside. Even if she leaves it hanging open long enough for Chloe to say, “Feels weird seeing you act so shy around me. I’m still the same old high school dropout you remember. All that’s changed is I skipped town with the most popular drama club nerd in town.”

“_Hm,_” Dana hums. Still smiling. Eyes still shining. “It was good seeing you again, Chloe.”

She doesn’t _stop_ smiling, either. Not when she finally closes the door. Not when she rolls down the window, and definitely, definitely, _definitely_ not when Chloe says, “That’s my actual number, by the way,” before tapping twice at the roof and sending her off with one last peal of laughter.

She doesn’t stop smiling, and neither does Chloe.

And.

“You sure about this? She’s got a kid.” Luke says, suddenly shuffling up beside her.

Then.

Chloe does.

Stop smiling.

She groans. “Man, she’s a friend. I’m not in the mood for another one of your weird tirades about people with kids.”

“It’s not that.” Luke’s hands are already held up near his shoulders in surrender. “It’s not that. It’s just…” And, here he turns, tries to make eye contact even though her gaze is still locked firmly on the road and the long-gone taillights carrying Dana out of her life. “It’s just, a kid is a _lot._”

“I know,” Chloe grunts. She starts tapping the pad of her thumb to each of her fingers. Once, and twice, and over, and over, and over.

“And your situation — ”

“I _know,_” She growls. Nearly shouts.

“ — is already a _lot._”

Chloe whirls on him. Glares at him. Stands far too close and towers far too tall for the move to come off as anything more than the blind fury that it is.

Luke doesn’t so much as flinch. Not that he’s ever been the type. Too much _LA ease_ in him to ever be bothered by anything Chloe might think to try. He even has the nerve to look _worried._ For _her._

Chloe rips her eyes away.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She isn’t entirely sure what she means.
> 
> But Dana lights up, distant suns from farther galaxies shining out through the blue of her eyes, and Chloe thinks, maybe, what she means is _for you, I always have time._

_Chloe regains her consciousness in waves. Slow, rolling things following a pulse completely separate to her own._

_Kisses up her stomach, feather-light and cold with the still of the morning._

_One to her chest. Another._

_Her collarbones. Another._

_Another._

_Her throat. Her jaw. Her cheeks and her nose._

_She loses count by the time they drift close enough to catch back in something every inch as unhurried; something lazy, and sloppy, and slow. Warm morning breath and the plush give of cool skin. Hands carding through messy bed hair, squeezing just enough to say morning even though the way that tongue is teasing for entrance says they’re miles past needing it._

_“G’morning,” Chloe says anyway, voice low and husky in that way voices are when they’ve yet to shake off the last little fragments of sleep._

_Her eyes stay closed._

_“Tell me what’s wrong,” the voice behind those lips tells her, each word a ghost against her skin._

_Chloe sighs. She waits. One breath. Another. “You were watching me sleep.”_

_“Tell me what’s wrong,” the voice says again. Chloe chokes on the way it pierces her through._

_Not one answer feels adequate._

_You travel so much, she could say. Each new day in this apartment feels like eternity without you in it. It’s too big, too empty, and feels, sometimes, like it’s just a place to keep your things. When you’re away, it feels like now. Like living on the barrier between consciousness and not. Like being barely halfway out of a dream, still unsure whether what you’re seeing is real. _

_She's still, still so proud. Even when her only involvement these days is listening to secondhand stories through crackling phone speakers; a voice too many drinks in, backed by music and cheers in a room more expensive than life, and,_

_It was the smart choice. Settling down. Staying behind to build a home for them to come back to. It was always the only way it was ever going to work. And, yet, still, it doesn’t make her miss those simpler days any less. The days of highways and traffic stops, cheap motels and ghosts. Sharing cigarettes on the cracked-up concrete in the middle of the night while moths and gnats danced in the flickering lights overhead._

_The time away hurts too much, she could say. When you’re gone, everything dissolves into reminiscing time we’ll never get back. Those easy first days with you, when the world was at our fingertips and we had nothing ahead but time and adventure. _

_Just once, maybe these new adventures could be for us both._

_She could say._

_Instead, she opens her eyes to find the world hidden from view. Pupils blown wide, red-rimmed, and scared. A smile. A mask that always fools everyone, and never ever fools her._

_She strokes a thumb along the side of the face staring back. Catches the beginnings of a tear before it falls far enough to matter._

_“I miss you already.”_

~*~

~*~

Bad dreams are rare, these days. When they come, when she’s _alone_, Chloe tends to find her way out to the balcony to soak in the sights and the sounds until her thoughts settle back down into nothing. Things used to be, Rachel was there to soothe her through it. Things used to be she’d do the same for her.

Recovery was never a straight line, but things used to be that they were all they needed to hammer it down into something close enough not to matter. Time and distance apart forced them to adopt a few new methods. Late night, early morning, globe-spanning phone calls are good enough when things get _bad_ enough, but time spent peeled apart by the breeze and the dark is all Chloe needs when it isn’t.

Below, on the street, a car alarm wails.

Chloe reaches over and paws blindly for her phone.

Five in the morning.

Close enough to morning.

She pushes herself to her feet, back still balanced against the wall as the too-rough stucco scrapes through her shirt hard enough to cut. She dusts herself off. Imaginary dirt and dust from the night wiped off into the impending bright of the morning for no reason but routine. No reason but to get herself moving. Too much time awake. Too much time sat still.

Inside, she stops again, one hand gripped on the sliding door frame. She drags her eyes over the place. Dark, dark hardwood floors and pristine marble counters. Framed copies of the magazine covers Rachel has graced hung up on the walls. Her attempt at decorating, because even after all of this, she is _proud, _and because even after all of this, Rachel _hates_ it in that _I could never actually hate your happiness_ sort of way. The fond irritation of a decade of love. The fact that they live in an apartment with a second floor sometimes feels like the pettiest form of revenge Rachel could manage; force them both into a better life whether Chloe likes it or not.

The downside to that, then, is that it really does feel like revenge. On mornings like these, it really, truly, does.

Chloe feels it every day, tucked away in the space, and the space, and the _so much _space between every piece of barely used furniture. Between the couch, mercifully already falling to pieces — the only thing she bothers using, because it means fabric fraying faster, feeling like home sooner — and the stain on the carpet from where she spilled a can of cheap beer one night. Couldn’t walk straight, couldn’t see straight, couldn’t actually bump into anything because the place is too, too big, and it took orchestrating a minor disaster by hand through a beer-haze of thoughts to actually make a mess.

She’s kept up wearing the same old clothes from her teen years around the place just to feel some sense of control over it all. To help make this place feel like home.

The kitchen, at least, she can concede to liking. Floor to ceiling cupboards packed full of pots, and pans, and odds, and ends that she’s gathered up in the years since their first apartment when all she had to work with was a broken refrigerator and that off-balance gas range with the busted up exhaust that rattled like it was about to explode whenever you so much as looked at it wrong. This new kitchen is still too much, still too fancy, and no one on earth really needs a one with an _island_, but Rachel mentioned back when they were first looking that it would be more space for storage; more space to make it hers, and Chloe didn’t have it in her to fight. Besides, she has. At least. Managed to make it feel comfortable in a way the rest of the apartment actively rails against.

And that matters.

One little slice of home in a place that isn’t.

Chloe wipes a hand down her face. Close enough to morning, but she was staring again. Standing in the doorway with the thing held wide open. Close enough to morning, but evidently not close enough to normal.

“Right,” she groans, gruff, and gravel, and grating. “Fuck this.”

She shuffles over to the kitchen, tosses her phone to the island, and opens the fridge door just a bit too hard. Everything sitting in the shelves rattles and clatters over with the rebound. She pulls out a butcher paper wrapped package of ground beef. Throws it right alongside her phone. Slams the door shut, and starts fishing around for a pan to throw on the stove. Induction, unfortunately, but the fan works, and the whole thing is as level as level can be, so she only really finds reason to complain when Rachel is around because Rachel knows she doesn’t mean it anyway. She never means it when Rachel is around.

Everything feels like _home_ when Rachel is around.

But.

Well.

Breakfast.

Chloe sighs, and groans, and runs both hands through her hair. The pan is already oiled and heating, and she might not have the first clue when she managed that, but her mind is the one that started it. All that fighting against the rest of her. Hours later and it’s still at it, so, as Rachel always says, _easier to accept it and keep going._

Keep going.

She double checks that everything is fine, first, for the sake of her sanity more than her safety, and returns to the meat. Shapes the thing out into something like a patty, seasons it — too much, because too much is always just enough when you’re trying to eat your way through dissociation like a hangover — and throws it on the pan. Some of the oil splatters back onto her arms. The feeling barely registers.

But then, keep going. Keep going.

She does. Washes her hands, and heads back to the fridge. Pulls out some eggs and a beer; one for the counter and the other for her while she heads over to the couch and turns on the TV just in time to catch the weather forecast on whichever one of the handful of local news channels it was already on.

She’s most of the way through drinking and all the way done with the weather — sunny and hot, who could have guessed? — before she heads back to her food. To flip the patty and throw in a few eggs and wait. Until she’s plated something mostly shaped like a discolored omelet with a burger shoved inside. Breakfast of champions.

An ugly, ugly, breakfast of champions.

“Hm,” she mumbles. Almost thoughtfully.

A quick trip back to the fridge, a half bottle of hot sauce later, and it looks at least a _bit_ prettied up.

Chloe shrugs and shuffles back over to the couch.

It tastes better than it looks, at least, and by the time she’s eaten the whole thing, Chloe feels at least most of the way back inside her body. So. It accomplished its goal. Mostly. Mostly is the best she’s got, these days.

Mostly is, also, the only reason she has enough of herself back inside her own head to notice her phone ringing away in the kitchen. At first, she assumes it’s just someone from work looking to ruin her one day off until the end of the month. At first, she sinks a few inches further into her seat. Not that the morning news is all that entertaining, but it feels like the better option in the moment.

At first, it works.

Then comes the voice mail. And, really, at that point, if Chloe plays up her groan as fuel to propel herself to her feet and to finally, finally go over and check, she’s pretty sure no one can blame her. It could be work. Much more likely, it’s some idiot trying to run a scam that relies entirely on her never questioning who _me_ is when they open with _hey, it__’s me!_

But, it could be work.

The reality, thankfully, is neither. She hits play on the message, and suddenly Dana’s voice is in her ear for the first time in a week, and suddenly Chloe is calling back before she’s even listened to the whole thing because it’s been a _week_ without so much as a text, and she just sort of assumed Dana was happy enough to leave things where they were. She’s got a kid, she’s got a job, she’s got a life, and whatever she might need _definitely _isn’t anything Chloe has to offer. But. She _called._

“Hello?” Dana answers. Two rings. Nervous.

If Chloe smiles at how easily she recognizes that tilt in her voice, no one, she decides, can blame her. “Hey, Dana,” she says. Her voice is raspier than she might have hoped. Still straining against the night and its schemes, but she powers through before Dana can ask. “Sorry you missed me; I was…” The rest of her sentence chokes itself off. She takes a breath, slow and steady, to try and pull it back. “Well, sorry anyway. What’s up?”

Not enough time to ask. Still more than enough time to worry. The next words out of Dana’s mouth are, “Oh, you sound tired. You weren’t asleep, were you? I know seven thirty is sort of a weird time to call.”

And, Chloe should be upset, probably. Confused. Surprised at the amount of time she lost, but she isn’t. She _isn__’t. _And she laughs a quiet, scratchy laugh.

“It’s fine,” she promises. “It’s fine.”

Dana laughs a little, too. Small, and breathy, and distorted by the static, and it sends too much warmth pouring in through the pads of Chloe’s fingers where she’s gripping tight at the phone. She exhales, and nearly lets herself forget the last few hours of her life when Dana adds, “Curiosity finally got the better of me. I know you _said_ this was your number, but I couldn’t resist checking.”

“Mmh,” Chloe says. She leans most of her weight up against the island, balances the rest on her elbow.

“Anyway,” Dana goes on, “Turns out you’re as honest as ever. Just like when we were kids.”

Chloe’s own smile twitches. A small, barely even there sort of wince. Her fingers start tapping away at the countertop silent enough to be missed without being in the room next to her. Of all the mornings to want to reminisce. “Yeah, I uh — I try not to think so much about back then,” she lies easily. “S’about as useful to me these days as trying to remember whether I still owe anyone we met on the road money for beer.”

“But you think about _me,_” Dana says. It isn’t a question. It also isn’t wrong. Not lately.

“Of course.”

Dana hums. Something in the tone, something in the pitch of it has Chloe intensely aware that something important is coming. Something Dana has maybe been working up the courage to ask, and oh, now that week of silence makes a little more sense. It has her breath steadying and her worry fading because whatever it is, she recognizes it, and whatever that means, she doesn’t want to miss it.

“So, speaking of owing people beer money,” Dana starts and then stops, and Chloe’s silence cracks apart to make room for a chuckle because _of course _this is how she asks whatever it is she’s about to ask.

“Yeah?”

Dana maybe laughs a little, too. “As I recall, you still owe _me_ a dollar or two. You know, not even bothering to get into all the interest you’ve built up by now.”

Chloe’s fingers still. Slow, and then fast, and then all at once, and she _smiles. _She smiles like she hasn’t since last week. Because Dana wants to see her again. Dana saw her after all that time, and she wants to see her _again._ She laughs, and Dana laughs, and things sit like that. A peaceful, awkward sort of silence that the both of them are scared to touch for fear that it might shatter into shards shaped like years. Things sit like that. For one beat and two.

Dana clears her throat before three. “What would you say to me collecting on that debt later today? If you’re free, I mean.”

“I am,” Chloe says. She is.

Another pause. Another beat.

“Buy us lunch?” Dana asks and falls quiet, as if to give Chloe the chance to ask what she means by _us. _As if she would ever forget a detail like that so easily. “I wanted to ask you out for dinner or drinks, but with my hours…"

"Oh, I'm sure that woulda worked _so _much better with the setup I handed you, too."

Dana laughs, shoulders straight past the comment. "_Anyway,_ I’m picking Trevor up from school around noon, and — ”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d love to.”

~*~

Chloe is, thankfully, _only_ fifteen minutes late when she finally pulls into the parking lot. Finding the place was something of a chalenge. Three months in, and Dana has already carved out space for her own little bubble. Three months in, and she’s already pulling back the curtain on corners of the city Chloe has lived in for years and yet never knew existed.

They’re at a little taco place at the edge of a strip mall. Run by parents of one of her recent hires, Dana says. One of her favorite places in the world, Dana says.

And. Truthfully. It smells amazing, and they’re not even inside.

A minor accomplishment given the breakfast she put herself through.

The much, _much_ larger accomplishment of the moment is the way her breath leaves her lungs like it never belonged to her at all when she finally spots the reason she’s here. If she thought Dana looked amazing yesterday, all end-of-the-business-day chic, she looks somehow better now, sitting in the back of her SUV, legs sprawled out across the blacktop and her son at her side, waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Her hair is up in a messy half-bun riding that line between intentional and bed head she didn’t care to fix, and she’s wearing a dark, French tucked, scoop neck tee, and faded, faded high waist shorts filled out just right.

The third accomplishment — and maybe the most important — is Chloe remembering to breathe before her staring becomes a _thing._

She opted for her usual, shredded up jeans and an old band shirt she turned into something close enough to a muscle tank one day because Rachel was gone and her impulse control along with her. She feels somehow underdressed.

It was easy to forget last week that Dana always dreamed of being a model.

Today, with that almost frantic panic nowhere to be found, forgetting is something slightly more difficult.

But, maybe, when Chloe hops out of her truck — a Ford pickup Rachel bought the very same day they moved into their first apartment, because after their days of road tripping and motel living, _old reliable_ and all its graffiti marked, rusted up glory had finally earned its rest — she isn’t the only one to feel that way. Maybe, when she lands on her feet, immediately swarmed by little Trevor, stars in his eyes and a story about homework loaded and ready to go, she catches Dana turning more than a little pink. Maybe, she catches Dana working through an unsteady exhale of her own in the flash before her attention turns entirely to the story about what first grade homework entails still happening at her side.

She isn’t entirely sure what happened to propel Trevor from zero to sixty over the course of the week, but it’s more than a little hard to care when Dana is still sitting there, watching the scene unfold like there’s nowhere else she would rather be.

“Hey,” Chloe says, those short few steps of distance finally gone. One of her legs slides into the space between Dana’s ankles. Because she lets her. Because she still hasn’t moved, hasn’t stopped staring, matching smiles, eyes locked on eyes, and something almost sparking in the distance between.

And then Dana nods. And that almost-spark is gone. She swallows down whatever might have been and breathes it out through a faint laugh. Pulls her legs just slightly closer.

Her eyes catch on Chloe’s hands, then.

“_Ladylike,_” she whispers. Chloe nearly misses it. But. The shape of a laugh. Another endlessly fond smile. “Your knuckles,” she adds, nodding her head toward the hand Chloe perched on Trevor’s head seconds ago in some halfhearted attempt to keep him still.

“Miss _Ward,_” Chloe shoots back, drawling her way over every played up, drawn out syllable. “Were you _staring_ at me?”

Deliberately avoiding the question, Dana shakes her head, lets her blush fall away.

“It fits you, somehow,” she says.

On instinct, on reflex, on either, or both, because this feels like stepping back into an always that hasn’t been always since before the eternity that passed, Chloe jabs a thumb at her chest and says, “Course it does. I’m the picture of femininity. Now, are you ready to show me this place, or what? I’m starving.”

“Yeah!” Trevor jumps in, striking a triumphant pose like maybe he spent every last second of those fifteen minutes Chloe wasn’t here arguing for the exact same thing. “Starving!”

He runs on ahead without waiting for an answer, and Chloe, maybe, possibly, leans down, slides her fingers along the skin of Dana’s elbow the instant they’re left alone with nothing but the heat of the day. She maybe, _possibly,_ leans in, too, too, close and whispers against the shell of her ear, “I wouldn’t mind showing you the rest, someday.”

But only maybe.

Only _possibly._

Because before Dana can answer, Chloe is darting on ahead, smiling perfectly innocent as she jogs to catch up with Trevor. No one saw it but them, no one heard it but them, so really, who can be sure it ever actually happened?

The food, when they do finally order, is every bit as good as Dana promised, and the extra time spent with her kid endears him to her more than Chloe might have thought possible. Dana is… She’s a mother. And maybe Chloe didn’t see that happening so soon, but the particular hell employed by time seems to be that the unexpected happens whether you want it or not. So. She’s that. But more importantly, she’s doing a good job with what she’s got. It’s impressive. She’s impressive. Far better than they had. Far better than their parents could, or would, or even _wanted_ to do for them with so much more at the ready.

Seeing that cycle broken _means_ something.

And by the time they’re done, Chloe is ready for that to be it. Ready to watch Dana leave, and maybe, maybe, maybe not stay completely silent this time, but to leave, still. She hasn’t been the sort of someone people need in their life for a long time, and Dana, especially, needs more than she can be.

But then she blinks.

Then Chloe blinks, and everything is where it was the last time they were here. The last time goodbye came around to say goodbye. Chloe leaning up against the driver side door, waiting and watching as Dana closes another.

And suddenly _Dana_ is leaning a little too close, chest pressed up against Chloe’s bicep and soft, soft, soft, and a palm pressed flat to her shoulder, and _god_, she smells exactly like she used to. Perfume like baked goods and sweets, _warm_ in a way that feels somehow like winter. Like heavy blankets, hot drinks, and a million flimsy excuses to get closer, and closer, and closer.

And, Dana asks, “I know you’re probably busy, but we’re heading to the park next. If you want to come.”

And.

Chloe should ask.

Chloe should ask something, too. Why Dana would want to include her in something so clearly a part of this new life she’s built for herself when she’s had more than enough opportunity to keep her clear; segmented and compartmentalized off into some other corner where she can’t possibly interfere. But in the moment, her thoughts are stuck somewhere around solving the mystery of when _she_ outgrew Dana, when _she_ became the taller one, and trying to string together any coherent series of words while Dana is still talking, still explaining, still _touching,_ is completely and utterly beyond her. What a sight she must make. A touched-starved mess after barely seven days.

And. Then. Dana leans closer. Barely, barely closer, and Chloe _still _isn’t listening, but her mind short circuits in its search for words, and the very next thing out of her mouth is, “It’s my day off.”

She isn’t entirely sure what she means.

But Dana lights up, distant suns from farther galaxies shining out through the blue of her eyes, and Chloe thinks, maybe, what she means is _for you, I always have time._

~*~

The park, it turns out, is a playground. Chloe probably could have figured that a few minutes faster had her attention been a bit closer to Dana’s _words_ than her,

Anyway.

The park. Parents of other kids, a suburban mom mob all grouped up in a far corner over benches and ledges with bags, and bags, and bags of _things._ Trevor excitedly takes off in their direction without so much as a second glance, and so Chloe gets a first-row seat to the line of stares, and glares, and indescribably judgmental looks coming her way in the seconds after. That one, too, she probably could have seen coming.

Anyone showing up with someone like Chloe probably doesn’t leave a particularly great impression with the PTA crowd.

At least they love the kid.

Still. Chloe almost, almost, considers mentioning that she should go; that she _really_ shouldn’t be here when it’s only going to lead to problems in Dana’s life, but then Dana’s fingers are at her waist, threading up, and down, and tangling into the back of her shirt, and they’re walking off to somewhere else. To some other bench in some other corner, completely — almost — out of sight of the others. They, Dana explains, might love her son, but don’t worry, don’t worry, there’s nothing to worry about because they already hate _her_ more than anything. Proudly divorced, openly bisexual, bar owning, single mothers? Looked on worse than anything Chloe might represent. There are no problems for her to bring.

“And besides,” Dana says, hand finally, finally falling away. “I want you here.”

Chloe brings them to a stop at that, frustrated _something_ landing them on the fringes of the mob’s line of sight, and she pulls Dana close. Arms around her shoulders until she’s closer, and closer, and whispering _don__’t do that,_ before her lips press hard to the bridge of her nose, because she doesn’t deserve _that; _could never deserve her problems, but she does deserve _this_.

Small town outcasts back at it again in the big city.

When she steps away, Dana frowns. In confusion, maybe. Some small spark of disappointment threaded along the line of her lips as her eyes flick over Chloe’s shoulder, and, oh,_ oh,_ of course the moms were watching, of course Dana thinks that’s why she did it. But. Maybe it doesn’t matter. She’s already bounced back, already found her handle on Chloe’s behavior and her relationship with physical intimacy like this isn’t only their second interaction in too many too long years.

“So, _LA._ I assume that was Rachel’s doing. You two still joined at the hip?” Dana asks, already farther and farther away, sitting at the bench, and Chloe wishes desperately she wasn’t speechless and empty; wasn’t completely unable to find the words to say what she means and keep Dana in reach.

Her lips press tight together, teeth sinking forward like they’re trying to dig a path through.

Dana studies her in silence. She hums half a step from knowingly. “That’s a no, then.”

There goes her chance.

Of all the days for her brain to break.

“No, it,” Chloe starts, and stumbles, and sighs. She shakes her head. Drags the pad of her thumbs over her index fingers hard enough to crack bone once, and twice, and again. Maybe if she slept last night. Maybe if Rachel wasn’t gone. Maybe if she wasn’t her, she’d have found an answer in time. “It’s a… Something. We’re,” Chloe sighs again. Throws one last glance across the park. Trevor is off on some adventure with his friends, not a care in the world. None of the others are still watching. No one but a pair with wandering eyes, restless legs, and the distinct unawareness that Chloe can read their lips. She collapses into the seat next to Dana. Sighs. Again. Deep breath in, deeper breath out. One of her legs starts bouncing. “We’re close, yeah.”

Chloe lets it drop. Lost cause, that kiss. She dives headfirst into this, the new conversation.

“She actually paid for this one earlier this year. Called it _a way to always remember our old lives,_ since she’s still allergic to calling things birthday presents.” Chloe tugs down the collar of her shirt, exposing — just barely — the head and the wings of a crow made from watercolor, from spilled ink, gentle fading colors spreading the length of her collarbones before disappearing out of sight beneath the rest of the fabric.

Dana watches, mouth cracked open in that particular sort of speechlessness that hasn’t ever felt right to name. And, maybe Chloe can’t tell _why,_ still distracted by the before in all the ways she tried so futilely to stop, but she can at least keep going. Throw Dana a bone and fill the silence with words until she remembers she’s the one who asked.

“It’s fitting enough, as goodbyes go.” And, maybe her smile is a little bitter, maybe she’s a little too broken and strained from years of watching time and age push the life she always knew to the point of breaking and straining in all the same ways. But. Dana reaches over. Wraps her arms around her shoulders. Pulls her close and nuzzles against the top of the head. _I know that__’s not the whole story, but I won’t push_, singing, soaring through every point of contact, and maybe, maybe, maybe, her smile isn’t that for long.

~*~

Chloe’s phone chimes. She barely notices. It happens again, and this time falls all the way out of her pocket and clatters more noisily than should be possible onto the floor of her truck. She jolts back awake with a snort and bangs her kneecap straight into the steering wheel.

Getting her bearings takes some time, after that.

When her vision fades back into focus, the thoughts follow suit. She’s somewhere in the underground parking garage back at her place. Hours and hours of driving around town because the thing with Dana, whatever it was, was _nice_, but she didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to give the ghosts of that place another night to ruin her life. So, she fell asleep here because maybe it’s still home, but it isn’t _home_ home, where the nightmares can reach her, and that’s the only part that matters.

Elbows and knees — again, of course — bang against everything in the cabin more than a few times before she manages to find her phone.

She barely remembers how to turn on the screen.

** _Max: _ ** _Hey, are you free tonight?_

** _Max: _ ** _I__’ll be done here in a few. There’s a new bar I wanted to check out._

Somewhere along the way, Chloe’s vision slipped back into the realm of dry and blurry, so she shuts her eyes tight. Opens them wide. Blinks once, and blinks twice, and again. Things finally come into focus.

** _Max: _ ** _I__’m buying!_

** _Chloe: _ ** _s ounds goo be there ina sec_

** _Chloe: _ ** _goof_

** _Chloe: _ ** _goos_

** _Chloe: _ ** _fuck_

She doesn’t bother waiting for Max’s answer, just throws her phone into the opposite seat and peels out of the garage as fast as she can. Something to do means not having to sleep. Something to do with _Max_ means not _wanting_ to sleep.

The wait for her shift to end doesn’t take long. The receptionist — Victoria something or other, short blonde hair and clothes _way _too expensive for this part of town — probably, definitely, has a thing for her, and she likes to flirt in that harmless mean-nothing way that always calms Chloe’s nerves. Insults, and eye rolls, and laughs just a bit too low to feel real. Like a fight without the fists.

And, hey, even without that, tattoo shops calm her down in some way beyond description of comprehension. Something about the smell. Something about the atmosphere. The people. Just. Something.

“Sorry, sorry, you didn’t have to wait too long, did you?” A smallish sort of voice calls from the other end of the room, and Chloe’s smile lights itself up in the very same instant.

Max Caulfield, best tattoo artist in the city — at least according to Rachel, before Chloe had collected ample evidence of her own — and the shyest little thing she’s ever met in her life. Shoulder length brown hair complete with bangs the perfect length to hide behind, and _freckles._ Jeans, and sneakers, and years old, oversized hoodies. Always smelling like some combination of greensoap, rubbing alcohol, and ink, even when she’s not coming off an hours-long session. And. Somehow. Not a single tattoo of her own. Chloe remembers asking about it during one of her first visits. _Could never decide, _she’d said, _too many ideas, _and that was that.

“Nope,” Chloe grins, stepping over to ruffle Max’s hair. A tease. Max is _small._ “Now c’mon, what new hole in the wall’ve you got for me today?”

Her still sleep-addled brain expects Max to answer. Things have been hard all day, and Max is like her, she likes things easy. It’s just, Max likes things _solved_ before she lets easy in. Chloe forgets, sometimes. Shy as she is, Max sees so much more than most other people. Shy as she is, Max is still all kinds of snark and clever comebacks. Wit, and smarts, and too many Max-isms to count.

_Wowser._

“You fell asleep in your truck again, didn’t you,” Max says. She looks her up and down, exhales something too exhausted for words. “Jesus, Chloe, she’s been gone for like three days!”

“It,” Chloe grumbles. “It’s been a week.”

“A week!”

Chloe shoves her hands into her pockets. Shrugs and darts her eyes away. Somewhere in the background, she can hear Victoria snickering.

“Oh my _god. _Come on then, you tall pain in my ass,” Max says, grabbing for Chloe’s hand and dragging her out the door. “Let’s go tell me about how much _you_ need a drink tonight.”

~*~

Not that Max’s track record of stumbled upon little-known places would ever have convinced her otherwise, but the place is… It’s nice. There’s clearly been some work done recently. Brand new hardwood countertops, tables, and chairs. Still enough of that good old trashy feeling left tucked between the floorboards and the cracks in the walls to keep it the kind of place you go to when you need a reminder that ‘smoky’ actually means _smoky. _Max shoves them both into seats at the far end of the bar.

“Hi, I’m Juliet, what can I get you two this evening?” The bartender chirps, gleefully, charmingly out of place.

Chloe answers, “I’ll take an old fashioned,” and it’s barely half a second more before Max snorts and barks out a cackle.

“God,” she says. “You’re like a cliche,” firmly ignoring Chloe’s answering _nothing wrong with leaning into it, _to bump their shoulders together and finish “A beer for me, thanks — whatever’s on tap.”

Juliet nods, throws them both one of those bartender smiles, and sets herself to work somewhere further down.

“So, I met someone the other day.” Chloe blurts the instant they’re safely out of earshot.

“No. Nope, we’re not doing this again,” Max says.

“What?” Chloe blinks. Max doesn’t answer. “_What?_”

And at that, Max _laughs, _“Look,” she says, a low, low, indoor tone of voice. “I know you and Rach have a whole deal about distance and coping, but like, seriously? It’s been one week.”

“Oh. No, that’s not what I mean,” Chloe says. Max just keeps on staring. Keeps on smiling. “Okay, look, that’s not what I mean _this time._ We grew up together. Her name is Dana, I’m _sure_ I’ve mentioned her before.”

She’s tripping over her words trying to figure out the right way to explain, less than seconds from falling to sputtering and stumbling because her brain hasn’t been screwed in right all day, and she’s almost completely oblivious, almost completely misses the way Juliet perks up at the mention of Dana’s name. She does, though. Notice. Even if a reason is harder to place. Even if stopping, asking, is harder to do.

She files it away to ask about later.

Max, on the other hand, laughs like she’s laughed a thousand times before, like nothing Chloe says could ever talk a path out of this. “Chloe. I love you. I would commit many, many murders for you, but if you think I invited you out here to be a big baby about your girlfriends before I’m even _one _drink in — ”

“Wh — screw you! I’m not a baby!”

“_Wah, wah, I__’m Chloe Price, and I have two hundred million girlfriends, woe is me,_” Max teases, lowering her voice, straightening her back, and drawing her chin inward. “That’s you. You’re a baby.”

“You’re a fucker.” Chloe shakes her head resignedly, chuckling despite herself.

And, of course, Max preens like Chloe called her _anything_ more meaningful, accepting her drink without so much as a glance when Juliet wanders back over, and she shoots back, “I’m a rascal. You love me.”

Which, well, yeah.

Yeah, she does.

A feeling that does nothing but grow as the night goes on. As Max falls drinks and drinks further into that particular snarky, friendly territory of hers. She finally lets Chloe open up — but only under the condition that she can make fun of her for _everything_ — and then they’re somewhere else entirely. Chloe’s talk about Dana turning into reminiscing on hometowns and childhoods. Other lives and other people in other corners of the world.

And, maybe Chloe is a little upset about that, because she’s just looking for something like validation, but she’s also barely touched her drink, and Max knows her well enough by now to know denying Chloe that validation is the only way to _really _move her past the problem. Which is how they end up here: Chloe being introduced to Max’s mom back in Seattle, over a phone call, in a bar. Chloe listening to Max’s mom talk about how their neighbor, Old Mrs. Lorusso, painted the front of her house to look like brick just last week, because she’d heard brownstones sell for a fortune over on the east coast. She’d thought it would help her sell, even though she’s got cheap plastic siding falling off every few days, and even though she can’t see well enough to paint in the first place.

Max barely bats an eye at the story, and it sets Chloe spiraling down a path of maybes and what ifs about a lifetime where they grew up together. Maybe they’d have ended up somewhere else. Maybe everything would have been different. Maybe time would have given Chloe enough of itself to appreciate those years with Rachel before they slipped through her fingers like water.

Then again, maybe a storm would have come and wiped them all out just for daring to hope.

She takes another drink. There isn’t enough alcohol on earth to stop the maybes, but no one ever got anywhere without trying.

An hour, maybe two later, and Max has talked herself out and drunk herself further. She’s moved her stool as close as possible, leaning into Chloe’s chest like a pillow and tracing the lines of each of her tattoos.

“Should come in for a touch-up soon,” she says, fingers pausing in their work at Chloe’s wrist. “Fading.”

And, if the old sleeve is already fading, that means the back tattoo could use some work, too. But it’s less of an issue right now when Max is so sleepy, waist deep in the kind of physical affection she’s always too shy about sober, because _that_ is almost, almost, everything Chloe has been missing. She’s trying. Max is trying. It’s almost what Rachel would do, and they both know it, but they both know, too, that Max has never been able to get it quite right. Nobody but Rachel is Rachel.

Not even her; this; the drunk best friend hanging off Chloe’s shoulder like the world might slip out from beneath her if she stops. There’s this place that Rachel takes up once she gets to know you, somewhere tucked away right behind your heart, and it’s _hers,_ no one else’s. A place nobody else can touch. Not Chloe, or Max, or…

Chloe has never really learned what it is. Just that it’s there when she is, and she takes it with her when she goes.

She’s tried to fill that space with so many things. Too many things. None of them fit. Nothing is right. But. This. This is good enough. Good enough is all they’ve got, these pathetic few who Rachel saw fit to love.

“My fav’rite canvas,” Max goes on, halting Chloe’s line of thought entirely as she leans forward to pat at her other shoulder. “Gotta look after you. Girlfriends is easy. Tattoos’re hard.”

“Right.” Chloe chuckles and downs the last of her drink. “I forgot you’re just using me for my beautiful body.”

“Course I am, dweeb.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> somewhere in the back of my head a goblin is laughing at me for daring to make this chapter so dense when the option to split it up into 2 was right there the entire time


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something opens up in Dana’s expression, hanging for a moment on the empty line of starless nothing between panic and tension before it falls in the space beneath, the minuscule void between them both, and it softens completely. Melts into a look that has Chloe’s mouth going dry, electricity like a live current humming under her skin, every sun at the center of every nerve waking up to burn moisture to dust.
> 
> High school crush come back for revenge again, and again, and again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a late update this time! I'm still not exactly happy with how this chapter came out, but I've been staring at it too long, so off it goes.

_“Chloe,” The voice says, trailing off with a whimper; fragmented exhales crumbling, unsteady inhales wavering, a fist gripping tighter, tighter, tighter at her hair. “We’ll be late.”_

_Chloe pulls back._

_Not far. Not enough for her breath to give up the constant heat of its presence in place of her newly absent lips, her tongue, her teeth. Not enough for that. But enough. She pulls back enough._

_She waits._

_She watches._

_Pupils blown out darker than the dark of night, and still shining, shining, shining through to the very core of Chloe’s being, curving past muscle, and sinew, and bone like thread through the eye of a needle. The hand scraping dull at her scalp falters, slows, and walks back that half-moan of a statement; tries futilely to shove her back into place._

_“Thought so,” she says. Grins. A massive, smug, ear to ear thing, too many self-satisfied puffs of air bursting forth like some good-humored song. She sets her tongue back to work._

_Goodbye can wait its turn. Goodbye can take this chance to learn some patience. Goodbye can step between them later, when Chloe is alone. Standing empty, drained, and dizzy with loss in front of those massive airport windows. Staring empty-eyed at the silhouette of a plane she’s only fairly sure is the right one as it shrinks smaller, and smaller, and smaller into the unbroken grey sea of clouds. Goodbye, and hurry back, and I’ll miss you so much that it already hurts. All of it. All of it can wait._

_This time is for them. Every last hard fought second. She sets her tongue back to work._

_“Chloe,” the voice repeats, lost somewhere between a croak and a whisper. _

_“Chloe.” Again._

_Chloe smiles. She makes a noise. Something light, close enough to another round of laughter that the difference doesn’t matter._

_“Chloe.” Again, and again, and again._

_She can feel a steady building throb under pressure of that grip. Once, and again, and again. A beat, another, and another. Heart in her skull, a pressure like setting fire to ice; breathing in every end of feeling.  
_

_“Chloe, fuck, Chloe — ”_

_The voice hitches, and stumbles, and slams face-first to a stop. Breaks slammed down like an empty, endless gasp; a grip going slack. The moment flinging into reverse. Suddenly gulping down air like there might never be enough._

_“Chloe.”_

_The hand in her hair twitches faintly. Scratches lightly. The body behind it falls slack into Chloe’s waiting arms, absent nerves and absent thoughts moaning, sighing, contented noises carving a path back to reality as she sits slumped against some filthy restroom door in some wrong corner of the building._

_“_Rach,_” Chloe admonishes, played up insult dripping from her still slick lips. “We’ll be late.”_

_Rachel blinks at her slowly, once, and then she’s tugging Chloe close, hard, and kissing away that tone in her voice, and that taste on her lips, and Chloe is falling back to laughing, and laughing, and laughing._

_~*~_

~*~

_Domesticity. _Sharing a couch with Dana’s son in her small one-bedroom apartment — her _home,_ because it truly does feel like a home in all of the ways Chloe hasn’t felt in too long to remember, the air itself brimming with that mysterious, intangible warmth of life — while Dana cooks dinner. Not exactly at the top of the list as far as places she might end up for the Chloe of one month ago. The her still stuck in the process of dragging herself back into town and off to the nearest bar to drown any evidence of the last few hours away underneath a lake’s worth of liquor.

She’s here, though. Right in the middle of it. Watching as little Trevor plays some racing video game on some new gaming console with a name she forgot almost as soon as she asked. That they still make those, both of those, came as something of a surprise.

Blast from the past in more ways than one, this kid.

Somewhere along the way, he took to sternly explaining the rules of the game as he went, talking slowly and deliberately like Chloe has never touched a video game before in her life. He’s probably making most of it up as he goes, as kids tend to do, because — and Chloe makes sure to wince internally for thinking so — _back in her day, _none of these rules existed. Finish first. That was _the_ rule.

But. He’s having fun. And she can’t fault him for that. He’s excited to have her here, and she can’t exactly fault him for that one either. She’s the one who’s spent the past month playing at… _Something. _Parent? Step-parent? Mom’s-Weird-New-Friend? One of them. She’s been playing at one of them for this kid, so, him being excited and him wanting to keep her involved is… It’s good. It means _she’s_ doing good, even if she’s juggling eight different sorts of _winging it _at any given point in time just to barely limp past the finish line.

If getting the chance to be something for him that she never had for herself is how she spends her time, so be it. If getting the chance to keep him from ever having to live a life like hers, like Dana’s, like Rachel’s, is where her days go, so be it. If getting the chance to exist in a home, a _real _home, is where she is now, so be it. Teenage Chloe might try to kick her own ass for thinking so, but these are the paths life has given her. Only one is something new. Teenage Chloe can keep her mouth shut.

As if in answer to the thought, Dana’s hand comes to rest on her shoulder, palm soft and steady, squeezing lightly, lightly, a silent greeting as she leans down and whispers, “Dinner should be ready in a few; still doing okay?”

“Yeah,” Chloe answers with an easy smile. She leans her cheek against the back of Dana’s palm, lets her lips brush against the spot. She raises a hand to cover Dana’s wrist, to draw empty patterns against the rush of her pulse. “Yeah. Everything’s perfect.”

Dana, then, goes very still. Her heart beats suddenly faster, noticeable even to Chloe; even through the soft skin of her wrist. Dana works her mouth open and then closed like she’s trying to say something. Like she thinks she has the words even if the rest of her seems to disagree. One of those rare sights that feel too much like a Dana that never existed to Chloe; too much like a stranger, a her that must have come into existence in the ten-year chasm between them to make sense within the framework of the past or the present.

A small, nervous laugh breaks the silence, and Dana turns to leave even more abruptly than she froze. “Good,” she says. “Good.”

At first, Chloe doesn’t manage much more than a blank stare. _At first_ comes to an end before her next breath.

“Hey, little man,” Chloe says, and Trevor obediently turns to look. “I’m gonna go talk to your mom for a sec, okay?”

He nods and smiles, pretending like he understands. Acting like he’s ten years older and ten years wiser, like he knows everything about everything happening to everything. Chloe smiles back before she can help herself. She reaches over and messes up his hair, and then she’s gone. She finds Dana back in the kitchen, hunched over the counter and staring stern-faced at nothing.

“Dana,” Chloe tries, reaching out and stopping short at the last second. A thought, too quiet to hear, decides better of it before she can find the strength to follow through. “What’s wrong?”

Dana laughs at that. Something sad. Something bitter. She pushes herself back to her feet, meets Chloe’s eyes. “Nothing, it’s just,” she says, and pauses, lips pressed in a long, flat line. “You keep doing that.”

Chloe blinks. “Doing… What?”

It is, it turns out, the wrong thing to ask. Dana’s shoulders slump minutely, like maybe Chloe not understanding was all she needed to confirm something big. Something meaningful. But, she’s smiling again in an instant. A broken mask that doesn’t cover anything it might have hoped to cover plastered over her features when she steps closer and cups Chloe’s cheek in her palm. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a little harder to read you than it used to be.”

Her hand falls gracefully back to her side.

But.

“No.” Chloe wraps her fingers firm around Dana’s wrist, and she lowers her voice, gentle, gentle, gentle. “Don’t do that. What were you gonna say?”

“Nothing. I promise it’s nothing,” Dana says, and for a second, it almost sounds like nothing. For a second, it feels easy to believe.

“_Dana._”

Another slow stream of air. A laugh without the strength to soar. “When we were kids, I could _always _tell why you were flirting with me.”

Chloe watches on in silence.

“Sometimes it meant you were bored. Usually, it meant you and Rachel were fighting.”

“Dana.”

“You always did have a hard time relaxing without that back and forth.”

“That’s not what I asked, Dana.”

Dana flexes her hands. Something in her breaks. Something in her gives in. “Fine,” she says quietly, “Fine. I — you’re making it very hard for me to tell what this is, is all.”

Again, Chloe blinks. Her hand falls away and back to herself.

“This. _Us._ You being here with me,” Dana clarifies, that sad, mysterious something still lining her every movement and every word. “You’re spending so much time with us Trevor practically sees you as another parent, but I can’t figure out what _we _are. Back in Arcadia you were like family, but now,” she trails off, and Chloe barely has time to feel bitter about being the way she says _family_ like she wants to say _a little sister _because Dana’s eyes are dragging up and down her body like she _wants_ her to see, wants her to know. Dana shrugs her shoulders, throws her arms out lightly to her sides like some silent admission she’s too scared to put into words._ See! See, look at you!_

She smiles, too. A small, haltingly beautiful thing. “We’ve been doing this for a month,” she states like it means something more to her than it ever could to anyone else. Maybe it does. “One month, and the most I’ve gotten out of you is a kiss on the forehead! I still don’t have the first clue what’s going on in that head of yours. You’re tiptoeing around my life before LA, you go almost completely silent when I ask about yours; it feels too much like it used to when we were younger, and you were using me to avoid your problems. Except, I have a kid now, and I can’t be okay with that. I’m _not _okay with that.” A silence begins, grows, stretches on and on. Dana sighs and cups Chloe’s cheek once again in her palm. An apology in place of the words that refuse to come. “Never mind. I’m probably worrying too much for my own good.”

“Worrying isn’t a bad thing, Dana.”

“It feels like it, right now.”

“No, that’s not,” Chloe says, and she might not know what she’s about to say, but she knows she means it before the first word even thinks to escape. She knows even if the rest trail off into nothing. Even if she lets her eyes drift closed, and her hand slide up to twine her fingers with Dana’s. “Okay, some things don’t belong to other people.”

Dana breathes out a quiet, bitter laugh. Teenage Dana’s advice thrown right back in her face:_ some things don’t belong to anyone else. Some things are just for you._

“Like, look, sometimes there are things you don’t want to talk about.” Chloe opens her eyes. “They belong to you, and you don’t have to let people in on them if you don’t want to. This shouldn’t be news. Not to you.”

“Chloe — ”

“I’m here because I want to be. I’m here because spending time with you makes me happy. There’s no ulterior motive hiding behind my back. Check hands, check my pockets if you need to. Things are allowed to be easy.”

“I’m something _easy,_ then?”

“You’re someone I care about, you bozo. I might not have the first idea how to… _This,_” Chloe says, and throws her arms out to the side. “With someone whose son is always in earshot, but that doesn’t mean I’m not trying.”

At that, Dana relents. She sighs, a weight lifted from her shoulders as she steps forward and buries her face in the dip of Chloe’s neck. “Okay. Okay.” And off the end of another; an exhale, a laugh, maybe more, maybe less, she says, “God, I’m sorry. You’ve got me thinking in circles like I’m a fucking teenager again.”

“In that case, I’ll give you a free question. Ask me anything.”

“Anything?”

“Exactly _one _anything.”

Dana opens her mouth just slightly, breath like a ghost against Chloe’s skin. She stops and licks her lips, furrows her brow in thought, and makes a show of deciding what she wants to ask as she steps back into her own space, and, then, “Where’s the line? What would you let me get away with?”

“Anything,” Chloe says immediately. Because she always has, and she always will feel that way, and time hasn’t changed that fact at all. Not the decade of distance between them, and not this awkward blink of month where everything and nothing have tangled together to happen all at once. Even back when they were younger, what they had was easy. What they had was enough to know that the answer would always be _anything._ Maybe Dana never saw it that way, but in Chloe’s mind, it was the easiest thing in the world. _Anything._ “Anything at all.”

Something opens up in Dana’s expression, hanging for a moment on the empty line of starless nothing between panic and tension before it falls in the space beneath, the minuscule void between them both, and it softens completely. Melts into a look that has Chloe’s mouth going dry, electricity like a live current humming under her skin, every sun at the center of every nerve waking up to burn moisture to dust.

High school crush come back for revenge again, and again, and again.

“_Oh,_” is all Dana says. Just enough weight in the syllable to tell Chloe that maybe, maybe, just maybe, she finally gets it. That, maybe, maybe, _maybe _the excruciating longing she’s felt bubbling up in the pit of her stomach ever since that day when Dana called her has finally found its target.

_Oh,_ is all Dana says. And then it isn’t, the mood lost on her next intake of breath; on the rush of cold air to fill in the still fresh absence of her body, and suddenly, suddenly, “Would you mind helping me set the table?”

Chloe smiles. Something real. Something easy.

Mood lost, but everything else lighter. She can work with that.

“Yeah,” she says, pulling out her phone, shaking it lightly back and forth. “Lemme get back to a couple people first? Make sure I didn’t miss any emergencies. Luke breaking another coffeemaker. You know.”

Dana smiles again at that. She reaches up and cups Chloe’s cheek again, running fingers lazily through her hair for a long, too-short moment before returning to the food. Before letting it all fall back and fall away every bit as easily as before. Mood lost. Everything lighter. Chloe slips into her boots and shuffles out the front door.

No emergencies are waiting, at least. Just a few missed texts. A few from Luke, a few from her boss. Drinks and a schedule update, if she had to guess. She scrolls through the notifications, not bothering to unlock her phone.

Something from Rachel. Even older than those.

** _Rachel: _ ** _Hey goblin, call me wh_

Chloe misses her chance to read anything more, because something new slides it off the screen and pulls her attention along with it.

** _Rachel: _ ** _I miss your voice._

She stares, empty, blank, until her screen fades back to black. And then she stares some more. And, too, a little bit more. For good measure.

And. Then. Dana is opening the door to check on her, because entire minutes have passed — Chloe stuck frozen in the hall like an asshole after promising to help with the whole reason she’s here in the first place — and whatever else might have been hanging on the end of that train of thought vanishes like a puff of smoke.

“Do you have to go?” Dana asks, genuine worry tinting her voice.

_I miss your voice._

An inhale, a little off balance and little more out of breath. Chloe scratches restlessly at the back of her neck, shoves her phone back into her pocket. “No. No, just a few assholes looking for free drinks.”

Dana snorts, the noise like a laugh that took her by surprise. She smooths her hands comfortingly over Chloe’s arms, turns, and hums, and does not, for one second, break away from Chloe’s gaze.

“Good. I want you here,” she says, that perfectly full lower lip caught between her teeth all the while, liquid blue eyes set on Chloe’s like a fire burning straight through her; burning time to a stop; peeling Chloe’s body open from the outside in. A single lock of auburn hair falls down and over her eyes, and Dana reaches up, brushing it away and breaking the moment, and suddenly, suddenly, time starts marching forward once again. Suddenly, suddenly, Chloe can breathe.

~*~

In retrospect, context clues might have led Chloe to realize where the rest of her evening was going before it all fell down on top of her. It is always, always, always, how things go with these two. Day after day of _if I bothered to think, I probably could have seen this coming._

She was hoping for a chance to call Rachel back. To let Rachel hear her voice. To listen to Rachel’s. To talk. A chance for that, or, at the very least, to answer her texts. Guilt over how much Dana had been worrying kept her from acting. Guilt, still, now, keeps her from acting.

Which is how she managed to end up here: following Trevor as he excitedly gives a tour of the apartment as if it’s really anything more than a big open space stuck working triple time as a living room, kitchen, and dining room. A short hall leading off to the rest. Trevor had _tried_ to show her before the food only to be shut down with a firm _not until after_ the moment Dana caught him trying to open up the pullout sofa he sleeps on like he genuinely believe it might be the most brilliant invention in the history of mankind. So, Chloe is taking the tour. Learning about cupboards that double as secret hiding places and closets that double as secret hiding places. About anything, and everything important and not. About how much life this place holds in his eyes.

It’s when they’re standing outside of Dana’s bedroom, Trevor urging her down to his level in that way kids have; that _I need to tell you a very important secret _dip of the brow and flick of the wrist, that something changes.

“My mom _really _likes you,” he whispers conspiratorially when Chloe is finally crouched down, sitting on her haunches and as eye level as they’re ever going to manage. “I’m _basically _a grown up, so I — don’t tell my mom — I know people who like each other share their bedrooms. You gotta ask her first, but between you and me, I think she’ll let you.”

Chloe nearly breaks into a cackle when the words register, and it’s only through years, and years, and _years_ of self-control honed by the idiots she calls friends that she manages with nothing more than a cough. Though, at that, Trevor’s face knits itself together in an expression too many kinds of intense for a kid of however old he is. She can practically see the gears turning.

He asks, “You _do _like my mom, right?”

Chloe shuts her eyes. Wipes both hands down her face.

_One month, Priceless._

_I miss your voice._

A bit earlier and she might have been able to say yes. If only life was that easy. She does. She _does. _But, she likes a lot of things right now, and she wants even more. She wants in all those sorts of ways people aren’t ever supposed to want. Sometimes _yes_ hides a mountain of decisions made over the years; decisions ready to come tumbling out at the first sign of trouble. It’s not a conversation to be having with a kid. Chloe lets out a huff of air, a maybe confused, maybe frustrated, definitely _something _passing through her lips, still more laugh than anything even despite the emotion fueling it all.

If only, kid.

If only.

Another breath, and Chloe realizes she still hasn’t answered. But, when she searches for something to say, something to move them off this particular subject, she hears Dana’s voice. She turns, and she realizes with a sudden ice-cold rush of clarity that Dana is arguing with someone at the door.

“_How did you even find us?_”

She climbs to her feet.

It doesn’t explain much, the change in perspective, but she steps closer anyway. Dana grips at the front door harder, oblivious and yet somehow in-tune with her movements. Chloe steps closer, and she can hear the strain as Dana tries to keep her voice calm, level, quiet, and,

“_He’s my kid too,_” drifts just far enough past the door to hear. A man’s voice.

Chloe takes another step.

“No.” Dana sighs and pinches at the bridge of her nose. “He isn’t. Now, I know you understand what a restraining order means. You need to go.”

The man does not go. He bursts through the door in a fit of rage, and suddenly Chloe is staring down one more face she hasn’t seen since she Arcadia Bay. She doesn’t remember his name. Just the face. One of those small-town assholes who was always destined to grow into a bigger, angrier small-town asshole. Captain of the football team. Dana’s high school sweetheart. The one she ended up hating. The one she was forced to stay with all the way through college because Arcadia is a little nothing town in the middle of a nothing patch of seaside forest where women don’t get to just _end _things. Not without leaving. The sort of place where women never have anywhere to run unless they run far enough that trouble will never find them again.

Some stray few answers slide into place as the man looks her up and down. About Dana. About Dana being _here. _A sort of crystallizing flash of ice-cold water rushing through Chloe’s veins, because _oh, family. Chloe is here. Rachel is here. LA is where Dana’s family is. LA was supposed to be safe; an escape from old troubles; far enough away that old troubles would never find her again._

Chloe should know how to deal with trouble. She should be able to stop this monster, because even if he isn’t _her_ monster, even if he isn’t _Rachel’s_ monster, he is still _a_ monster, and she’s spent years making herself strong enough to fight back. Only, somehow, in the face of the familiarity glinting through his eyes, every scrap of armor and strength she built so carefully over the years — the attitude, the muscle, the tattoos, and the _look _— stop meaning anything. In the face of a monster that was there for nearly every bit of weakness she showed, none of it means a thing.

She should be strong enough to tell him to leave. She should be strong enough to punch him out and throw him through the window.

She isn’t.

She freezes.

“Dad?” Comes a whisper from somewhere behind her. She dimly recognizes the feeling of Trevor shrinking behind her legs.

_Good, _she thinks, _he knows better. _But. Chloe stays frozen. The grip of too many memories buried in shallow graves; memories strong enough to dig their way free and pull her down to stillness, even now, years later, claw at her ankles and hold her rooted to the ground.

The man — the monster — shoulders past Dana and sends her stumbling into the wall.

“_You,_” He growls.

Suddenly, Chloe is back in Arcadia. Before. Years, and years, and years ago.

_It’s cute that you still think we’ll make it, Priceless._

Suddenly, Chloe is back in Arcadia, reliving days and nights of hiding from everything that lurks in the dark.

_Let’s go see a movie, I don’t want to think about this right now._

A monster’s fists raining down on her body, broken arms, broken ribs, and broken legs. Shoulders and knees dislocated for sport._ Come here, come back to me, Chlo, it’s just me, it’s just me, _whispered against the back of her neck, hands threading through her hair and nothing but a single denim jacket between them. No protection from the night but some stray few thinning, gauzy layers of clothes and the back of the lighthouse bench. _I’ve got you; I’ve got you._

An RV tucked away in some never-used parking spot at the beach, and another monster entirely, drunk, passed out face-first in the sand with a loaded revolver inches out of reach. A girl drenched in water, a girl barely still herself, a girl with too many drugs in her system. Too many to count, too many to explain, her tank top ripped straight down the front as she comes running, barreling into Chloe’s arms hard enough to send them both tumbling over, and, and,_ you’re okay, you’re okay, _a prayer drowning out the tear filled chorus of _no, no, no, no, no, _

And.

Three bodies sharing heat as easily as they share smiles, and weed, and bottles on bottles of stolen forties. Three bodies wrapped up in the stack of blankets Rachel always keeps stashed underneath the seat in Chloe’s truck.

_If anyone can find a way out of this place, it’s you two. Trust me. Trust me._

Chloe takes a deep breath, blinks herself back to the apartment. Something, she realizes, is shaking.

She takes another. The room is too small. The air is too thick. The something, she realizes, is her.

She doesn’t look back. Not for Dana, not for Trevor, and not for the monster.

_I miss your voice._

She leaves.

~*~

Two things happen very quickly when Chloe finally makes it home.

First, she walks — too calmly, too steadily, and she’ll probably find space later to recognize the time where forethought should have been — up the short flight of stairs to the bedroom. She draws her fingers over the wooden nightstand on Rachel’s side of the bed. She raps her knuckles on the edge once, and twice, and then her hand is off, seeking out movement, seeking out a rhythm to accompany the music of silence.

The nightstand is empty, save for a lamp and the still unfinished fantasy book she left behind. Some paperback with the watery silhouette of a deer cast in blue and violet. It came up in a call once, years ago; Rachel always leaving little unimportant things like that behind. A book here, a shirt there; a pair of shoes, or a jacket, or even a pillow misplaced just so. _Little reminders that you’re my home,_ she called them, _proof that I’m always coming back. _Neither of them had the courage to bring up that it had been happening ever since they were teens. Warm laughter and the easy way Rachel touched her, held her, loved her; the way she left countless little pieces of herself in Chloe’s possession like anchors keeping her chained to life.

Chloe shakes off the memory. She opens the drawer.

_I miss your voice._

Resting in the middle of too many stray lip balms, cough drops, and those stupid little electric air freshener pods is a still wrapped, unopened pack of cigarettes. The drawer on Chloe’s side is empty save for a lighter. Some silly _this door won’t open without both keys_ sort of setup. Rachel’s idea, obviously. But. That memory stays in the back of her mind. An echo of a thought at most. Chloe’s eyes catch on the pale-yellow note slapped on the front of the plastic, Rachel’s handwriting, big, bold lettering, spelling out a message for her.

**EMERGENCIES ONLY!**

**DON’T FORGET I LOVE YOU!!!**

She grips the pack loosely, casts a glance over toward the other side of the bed. To an answer that might be enough to still her rising nerves without needing to call Rachel at all. Without needing to fight through too many warring sources of guilt to sound like she believes it when that voice comes crackling to life, a faint raspy chuckle and halfhearted chiding that _it’s not your fault, you’re allowed to have bad days _like the softest sort of exasperation. A voice like silk draped over the dull edge of a knife.

_I miss your voice._

She grips the pack of cigarettes loosely, and then she doesn’t.

First, she steals the box and the lighter.

Second, she storms back down to the kitchen, cigarette already lit and balanced between her teeth. All the good liquor is hidden down there. Maybe, she thinks faintly, this way, she won’t need to call Rachel. She can sort through her problems her own way. Drink, and smoke, and panic her way into a dreamless, restless sleep.

It might not be a smart plan, but it’s still _a_ plan.

A plan that crumbles to dust the moment she reaches the kitchen and bangs a hip into the island, doubling over in pain while her lighter clatters off somewhere completely out of reach, out of sight. The sharp, stinging pulse of it lands her somewhere on the floor. The burn of ash on her knees and the brush of the cold white tiles against her palms only somewhat distracts from the hurt. She doesn’t bother to climb her way back up, just rolls resignedly onto her back, settling into her new temporary home.

_I miss your voice._

_I miss your voice._

_I miss your voice._

She pulls out her phone, taps out her passcode, and blows another burst of ash off the starburst of light at the end of her cigarette.

And, then, she stops.

** _Rachel: _ ** _Hey goblin, call me when you can!_

** _Rachel: _ ** _I miss your voice._

The whole world falls away. Time abandons her. Minutes gone, and she recognizes the feeling of her body moving. Hours, some faint, bleary knowledge that her fingers are tapping something out, pressing the phone to her ear. Days, months, weeks, waiting, waiting, waiting as it rings. And rings.

And rings.

What a train wreck. All that talk about preventing someone else from having to live her life, and she runs at the first sign of trouble. All that self-improvement, and she’s still the same terrified little girl as always. No wonder her only real friends are the lazy jackass at work who flirts because he knows she hates it; who she lets get away with it because she knows he doesn’t mean it, and Max. Max, the crush who cared too much to say yes. The crush who cared too much to leave. Who else would put up with someone this pathetic but them?

The phone rings again.

“Hey!” Rachel’s voice bubbles, the rise and fall of it both smooth and rough, like the last missing piece of a puzzle sliding into place, letting Chloe feel something close enough to whole.

Chloe opens her mouth; starts to think about saying something; tries to think of anything _to _say, and,

“Sorry you missed me! You know how it goes. Leave a message, etcetera, etcetera.”

A beep screams through the speakers. If it were possible to sink into the white of the tile, to be swallowed up and forgotten until the moment Rachel shows up in the doorway, Chloe might have liked to know how.

“Rach,” she whispers, almost more rasp than word. “I — hey, you. You’re probably up for work by now. Sorry about that.” A knock at the door interrupts her for the shortest of seconds. Barely an exhale of surprise before she’s back in her head and pushing forward. “Uh. Sorry I missed your texts earlier, I was — ”

The knocks come again, notably more frantic this time. This time, too, they manage to pull Chloe’s attention.

“God dammit,” she hisses under her breath, and then shouts across the room. “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any, fuck off!”

The knock does not fuck off.

It, in fact, starts up again.

Without thinking, Chloe throws her phone at the door. It makes a satisfying enough crunch at it shatters to pieces. Silence comes next. Realization comes after. And then, again, the knock. A groan rips free as Chloe struggles against the dead weight of her body to pick herself back up. She drags herself over.

“What,” she bites, hoping the edge she grinds her voice into might scare off whatever girl scout selling, petition having nobody is waiting.

It might have, in another situation. Only, the somebody is Dana.

“Okay, sweetie, no,” Dana says with a look Chloe might describe as guilty in any other situation. She plucks the cigarette out of Chloe’s mouth and grinds it out on the heel of her shoe.

“_What,_” Chloe says again in an altogether different tone of voice, for an altogether different sort of reason. She’s staring. Ogling, probably, eyes caught on the folds of Dana’s blouse and the way it pulls tight over her skin. The way the shadows of the lights overhead dance and play in the dip of her clavicle, and the way she’s staring back, just slightly out of breath, just slightly exhausted. On the way that she is _here._

Dana inhales then, very deeply; _very_ aware of the direction it sends Chloe’s eyes. She sets her hands on her hips, still waiting, waiting, waiting like waves and waves of cool ocean air. And she smiles. Dana smiles, endless reserves of patience curving her soft lips into something small, and caring, and beautiful when she asks, “Can I come in?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I should go,” she says, each word a burst of flame spurring that spark in Chloe’s stomach to the heights of an inextinguishable roar.
> 
> I should go, she says, and she does not move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter kicked my ass! Sorry it took so long, I hope you all enjoy!!!

_“Hey, you.”_

_The words come rattling through Chloe’s phone speakers, for once clear enough to make out the familiar rasp of Rachel’s late-night voice. Years ago, Chloe might have had the common decency to feel embarrassed at how quickly she lit up at the sound. The Chloe of today does not. She happily tosses her empty beer bottle off to the other end of the balcony, smiling like nothing else matters._

_“Hey yourself,” she says, head lolling back against the wall. There was so much she had hoped to say. So much to explain, to share, to let loose into the world. _

_But maybe, maybe, nothing else matters but this. Them._

_They’re both drunk. Easy enough to tell by the particular cadence of breath filtering in through the static and the distance. They’re both drunk, both wide awake, both broken, again, after barely two weeks apart. Life is better than they ever dared to dream back in Arcadia Bay, and yet here they are falling to pieces like none of it matters. Like nothing else happened but them._

_It should be embarrassing._

_Chloe should _feel _embarrassing._

_Instead, Rachel takes a drink with an audible gulp, and Chloe’s smile grows._

_They could talk. Most late-night early mornings winding down a long enough road to end up here, they do. Today, though, seems content to allow them space to exist. Space to do nothing but _be_ with each other in the only way they can so far apart and with nothing but the rise and fall of unsteady exhales traveling the length of the world._

_They could talk. About everything Chloe wants to say. About how Dana found her way to them after all these years, and about everything she’s become in such a terrifyingly short stretch of time._

_All of our friends keep asking after you, she could say, because they see I’m miserable without you, and because even just the sound of your name is enough to make everything, in every life, light up like nothing else on earth. _

_Everything feels different, she could say, and the only thing in the world that matters is letting you be a part of it, too._

_This place just isn’t the same without you, Rachel. She could say._

_She does not._

_Just like Rachel stays silent, breathing steady in and out. Just like Rachel doesn’t talk about her long hours, the parties that aren’t really parties, or how she wishes she were home drinking too much cheap supermarket wine, curled up in Chloe’s arms and watching bad late-night medical dramas. Cracking jokes about the old men in old suits hoping she’ll put out for the promise of new work._

_She could._

_They could._

_But they don’t._

_They’ve had those conversations before._

_The names might have changed, and maybe the places too, but everything that matters — the feelings, the words, the essence of it all — is the same as it’s ever been._

_“Hey,”_

_An exhale. An answer._

_“I love you.”_

~*~

~*~

Something soft is pressed up against Chloe’s back. Something warm. Something that feels an awful lot like a some_one._ It’s there in the faint rhythm of life faintly out of tune with her own, in the way that, when she shifts, the something — someone — shifts too.

Chloe isn’t entirely sure how she got here.

But she sucks in a slow, deep breath and nods to herself; begins taking stock of her surroundings. She’s still dressed in what she was wearing yesterday, and, judging by nothing but feel, so is the mystery at her back. There’s that, at least.

Chloe blows out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and feels her awareness fade itself back to clarity. The sun is out, she realizes, pale blue light of the early morning leaking in through the windows and burning away the fog at the edges of her perception just that much more.

And it _is, _she realizes, a someone behind her. An arm — soft skin, slender fingers, and a wrinkled sleeve stuck at the elbow, halfway to unrolled — snakes over Chloe’s hip and under her shirt, pulling her impossibly closer. The dead weight of a half-asleep gesture made in the short glittering moments before consciousness. Lips brush gently against the back of her neck, sending off a sigh into the quiet of the bedroom. She can feel the warmth of the day pulsing through that touch.

_Dana._

Chloe lets herself smile.

Everything she hadn’t had time to remember and everything the night held patiently in wait for this exact moment comes flooding suddenly back.

~*~

“Can I come in?” Dana had asked, uncaring or maybe just oblivious to Chloe’s shock.

_Can I come in, _she had asked, like it was perfectly normal for her to be there. Like it was perfectly normal for her to know exactly which apartment was Chloe’s. Like it was perfectly, perfectly, _perfectly_ normal for her to have followed this far.

“What,” was all Chloe could manage, the only sound strong enough to push past the countless layers of confusion clamping down on her throat despite the before and again that had lived and died in the span of short minutes. Maybe she knew somewhere deep down that she needed to say something more, but knowing wasn’t at all enough to make it happen. Everything was a record caught on a loop, everything was _Dana is here, Dana is here, Dana is here, _over, and over, and over, and Chloe didn’t have the willpower to throw herself forward. Maybe Dana saw that. Maybe Dana was feeling restless. But, maybe, too, she was hurt. Maybe she took that repetition, that _what, what, what,_ as a denial in the making.

Maybe.

Because her very next words were, “I’m sorry, I can go.” She flashed Chloe a smirk torn somewhere between understanding and hurt, one hopeless last-ditch effort praying for the chance to fix the something their past came back from the dead to break. “It’s just, I’d like to talk. I think you would, too.”

Any response Chloe might have been building toward, any answer digging to freedom only to be caught in the act in that final stretch to life was already long gone, falling back toward some indefinable void in the pit of her lungs, decimated on the spot by the way Dana’s mask flickered again, momentarily, to reveal just how much she had hoped. How much she _wanted _despite her fear, and her worry, and the knowledge that Chloe might say _no._

“You,” Chloe finally said instead, throat flexing itself back to silence before she could say anything more, and so she stopped. She squared her shoulders slow, slow, slowly before returning Dana’s gaze, grabbing Dana’s wrists, and urging her gently inside. _Please, please, please. _Dana lit up like a star in the night, and suddenly Chloe was stumbling, falling forward, caught off guard as the ground began to shift and to twist, falling hopelessly into the light of her smile. An easy tug against her own grip, and Chloe’s face was buried in the crook of Dana’s neck, hands digging too hard at the shape of her, and, “What the fuck,” she whispered. A desperate cough that might have hoped to be a sob shook its way free. “What the _fuck._”

If only she knew enough to know what part of the night she was directing it at.

Dana though, just smiled that smile of hers and laughed in relief, burying the sound of it — ethereal something beyond the reach of definition — deep in Chloe’s hair as she led them both inside, and maybe, maybe, Chloe thought, that mystery hadn’t needed an answer. It could be any or all, but the only thing in the world anymore was that Dana saw her on the brink and pulled her to safety without so much as a misplaced frown. The only thing in the world was the soft, and the warm, and the comfort of her arms.

The rest of the night in the aftermath of that wave of feeling blurred, and flashed, and faded together. Fragments remained important enough to stay clear and stay whole, but the rest…

Dana led her to the couch. Dana disappeared, off on her own to dig through the fridge. Dana came back with a beer in each hand, and Dana very specifically did not comment on the framed pictures of Rachel lining the walls with anything more than a muted _hm._

There was a moment when Dana sat down next to her, that Chloe realized she would try to explain herself. There was a moment when Dana looked into her eyes, met her gaze with hesitance and confidence warring between the shimmers reflected off those unsteady waves of blue, that Chloe realized she wanted to hear. She wanted to know.

Just… Not then.

And so, she pulled herself back. She pulled herself away, and she felt her thoughts catch one after the other on the fact that Dana was _there. _A lifetime of chasing after others, a lifetime of desperately wishing people would just stay, just stay, _just stay _before they left her alone with nothing for company but herself and a countdown to a return to normal. A lifetime of that, and even then, even in the midst of _being_ chased, being found, being caught, she had no clue how to behave because everything that she was existed on the other side_._ Her thoughts were caught on a hook, dragging themselves behind themselves and tearing up the walls of her mind to reconcile one with the next with the next until eventually, eventually,

Dana was there. Dana was already there. Dana was staying.

She was caught. There was no one left to catch.

“I don’t,” she tried, words breaking free before she could register what she was about to say. She couldn’t meet Dana’s eyes. She stared at the space between their thighs instead, tapping restless fingers on her own. “I don’t want to talk tonight.”

She couldn’t meet Dana’s eyes.

And then she could.

And then she did.

And finally, finally, _finally, _she knew what to do. _Gentle,_ Chloe reminded herself, plucking the beers from Dana’s hands and placing them off to the side, on the floor, safely out of the way. _Gentle,_ she reminded herself, _don’t chase, don’t chase, don’t scare her away. _She leaned into Dana’s space, eyes locked on hers every step of the way, _gentle, gentle, gentle, _and then came a flicker in that deep ocean blue, and a single hitched breath, and the soft slide of Dana’s lips on her own wiped away every torn scrap of thought still clinging to movement in her mind.

Dana was there. She was there, and she was staying, and she was so much more willing under Chloe’s touch than she might have ever hoped to imagine, ever dared, ever dreamed, no hesitance at all in the way she dragged her hands — still cold from the drinks — up Chloe’s neck to cup at the back of her head, gasping, humming, sighing contentedly with every slow movement of her mouth. Every touch of her tongue on lips. Every brush of her teeth on flesh. Every teasing smile as she pulled away and gave Chloe the time to think _gentle, gentle, gentle_ in the final few instants before Dana laughed like she was living in the punchline of a joke only she could hear and kissed her again. And maybe, actually, gentle didn’t matter so much after that.

Maybe. But then Dana had pulled back fully, satisfaction in her eyes, and Chloe’s awareness returned enough to realize that they had shifted so that she was lying on her back. That Dana was on top of her. But. Then. Dana had pulled away.

It had felt, in that moment, like maybe she was asking for more than Dana was willing to give. She only wanted to talk, but maybe, too, she understood. Maybe, like she always used to, Dana saw the limits of what Chloe still had within her, still had left to give, and knew she would have time to find an opportunity later. Maybe, like she always used to, she saw Chloe running from too many things to count with no goal in sight, and, like she always, always used to, chose not to ask, chose not to fight, but conceded to her every desperate demand for help, luring Chloe safely back to stable ground with nothing but every single thing she wanted.

Whichever it was, whatever reason she might have had, she was there. Dana was there, glassy eyed, out of breath, and staring back with the sort of trust Chloe hadn’t expected to see from anyone, anyone, _anyone_ in her life but Rachel.

_I miss your voice._

Chloe shot to her feet.

She led Dana to the bedroom.

_I don’t want to talk tonight._

For the first time in too long to remember, Chloe slept without nightmares.

For the first time in too long to remember, Chloe woke with a smile.

~*~

In the easy quiet of the morning, Chloe is happy. In the steady building warmth of the sun, Dana is waking, pressing lazy, sleepy kisses to every patch of bare skin at Chloe’s shoulders that she can find.

Giving up that feeling to roll onto her back; to pull Dana closer, closer, closer, is, Chloe thinks, something of a struggle. Significantly less so is the act of sighing out a laugh when Dana’s only response is to pout; of returning that warm, warm press of lips sparking electric fire in the pit of her stomach with tens, and hundreds, and thousands of her own to everywhere that doesn’t matter.

She isn’t exactly sure when her lips catch Dana’s. Even less sure is the point when the easy teasing of it all fades into something else heavy and slow; the weight of Dana’s body on hers, curves, and heat, and _soft,_ the give of skin beneath her fingers, everything full to the brim with the intense blurred tunnel vision of lost thoughts, wet lips and smug little smirks drowned out in an instant by the lap of a tongue at her mouth, and, and, and,

Dana leans up, leads Chloe along with her, far, and far, and farther until her head is angled just so; until she’s given up enough ground that the racing pulse of her throat is on display, the steady sounds of Dana’s breath brushing, and racing, and spilling across every inch as she moves closer, and closer, and closer, and, then, stops. “I should go,” she says, each word a burst of flame spurring that spark in Chloe’s stomach to the heights of an inextinguishable roar.

_I should go, _she says, and she does not move.

Pulling in enough air to qualify as a breath is nothing short of a minor accomplishment, and pushing it back out in a mostly complete exhale elevates it to major. Though, Chloe makes sure to sideline that sense of pride when she realizes Dana is still, still, unmoving at her throat.

“You,” Chloe starts. Stops. _One month, Priceless. _She swallows hard enough to feel Dana smile something feral. “You could stay.”

“But I _should _go,” answers Dana, distinctly — _unfairly _— level and unaffected like the past month of Chloe being the one in that position counts for nothing now that the unscalable wall they imagined between them is gone. “Trevor is with my neighbor, bless her heart. I need to thank her. And apologize to her. She — it all turned into a mess after you left, Chloe.”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have — ”

“No,” Dana interrupts, “No, no, no.” She rises up to rest her weight on an elbow, reaches up to cup Chloe’s cheek, and kisses her again. “You had every right. I’d have recognized that look in your eyes even with mine closed.”

All Chloe manages in answer is a disbelieving grumble; a halfhearted noise of frustration.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Dana repeats. “You’re allowed to be scared.”

This time, like the last, Chloe has no answer. This time, _un_like the last, Chloe knows Dana is right. And Dana kisses her like she _knows _she’s right. Again, and again, and again. She smiles into it, humming at the way Chloe lets herself relax, going slack and pliant, more than she’s ever let herself be for anyone else on earth but one.

_I miss your voice._

When Chloe finally regains enough of herself to realize she’s being led around — again — she growls, fingers curling their way toward fists from their tangle in Dana’s hair. She doesn’t let Dana return to her throat. She does, however, allow Dana the space to run her fingers in satisfied little trails over every part of her shoulders she cares to touch. She lets the heat of the moment bleed away into silence.

“So, you remember Trevor, right?” Dana asks after too long to know. Too much eye contact and unbroken quiet, peace, and calm, and the tension of the last month nowhere, nowhere, nowhere to be found. “Like, _our_ Trevor, not — not mine. The guy we grew up with.”

Chloe nods slowly. Her eyes drift closed.

“Would you believe we had a thing back when I was still married to Logan?”

At that, Chloe snorts, cycling through too many lighthearted thoughts to count:_ Only that long? Are you sure? Are you really, really sure? _

None of them finds the strength to find voice, so instead, she opens her eyes slow as they shut, and she smiles like the world has suddenly flipped somewhere close enough to normal. Close enough for some vague hint of control to feel almost returned. “Yeah,” she chuckles. “Yeah, I would.”

A little knowing hum is her reward, and Dana continues, “After the divorce was finalized, Trevor happened for real. Both of them.”

Chloe doesn’t laugh, but it is a very, _very_ near thing.

“I’d call it a shame we never managed to be more than a few fun nights, but,” Dana says, smiling faintly as she glances over to the window and shrugs like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Her eyes find their way back to Chloe’s when she adds, “Well, he’s still very special to me. And I think he realized how things were going to end before I did.” The pause she allows before continuing, the flick of her fingers over the collar of Chloe’s shirt, and the way her eyes shine more intense than Chloe has ever seen them is all, almost, almost, almost too much. “We’re still friends. _Best _friends. He was always there when I needed someone. That’s important. You don’t throw that away.”

No response in the world seems fitting enough for that, so Chloe nods and gives Dana the opportunity to smile through her relief.

_I miss your voice._

“After that,” Dana says, “I don’t know. Logan started causing trouble for both of us after he found out. My dad started causing trouble after he died. _After_ just kept happening until I left.”

“Shit never stops,” Chloe says in something close enough to agreement. She shrugs, reaching up to run her thumb over Dana’s chin.

It is, somehow, somehow, the right thing to say. Dana smiles that smile of hers, gaze locked on Chloe’s, endless blue glittering at every corner.

“Shit never stops,” Dana agrees with a breathy half-laugh, and the picture she paints in that moment — stray sunbeams peeking in through the gaps in the blinds to drape over her shoulders, that smile unwavering and endlessly loving, long lashes dipped low over the blissful warmth of affection sparkling through her eyes and from every last inch of her — is, Chloe thinks, the sort of thing others might write poetry about. The sort of thing hidden away in Rachel’s favorite books, locked away behind two, and three, and four in a series of good versus evil, fantastical adventures, and messy, broody romance. Pretty words that Chloe doesn’t have the first clue how to write, or to think, or to say. Words that Chloe has never known at all.

So, instead, she smiles.

_I miss your voice._

She smiles, and before she can think better, says, “Beautiful.”

“Okay,” Dana says through a laugh — practically a snort — something disbelieving, and maybe, if Chloe’s hearing hasn’t completely lost itself in the sound of it or the way Dana flushes faintly down past the collar of her blouse, almost every bit as hesitant as she was in the before.

Chloe urges Dana closer, gently, carefully, until their foreheads are touching and there isn’t anything in sight but each other. “I mean it. Besides,” she says. “It’s not as if I’m out here saying that shit to everyone, accept the compliment, idiot.”

Dana laughs then, real, and loud, and she kisses Chloe before she’s even halfway to done, one smile catching another in the easy, lazy warmth of morning, fading slow, and sweet, and steady into searing heat, and burning touch, and more, more, _more,_ until Dana is straddling her waist, hands touching _everywhere,_ and there isn’t a single molecule of air left between them but for the fuel behind their matching empty gasps.

Trying to reach for it, that air, seems for a moment to Chloe like a smart idea. She tilts her head away to start, only to realize far too late that Dana wants — and she does, too: want Dana to want it — to take the move as an invitation.

Dana takes full advantage.

She trails too many too-gentle kisses up and down her neck, nails scraping the patch of skin under Chloe’s ears as their bodies melt together, and,

The need for oxygen, finally, unfortunately, sends a dose of icy realization rushing through Chloe’s veins. “Should I,” she tries, struggling against the piercing cold and the distinct lack of clarity of thought not to groan, or to flip Dana over, or to do every single thing she’s been wanting to do since the strangest wave of dumb luck in the world blew them back into each other’s lives. “If — if Logan,” she says, aiming for a new tactic, letting the name sit in the empty of silence just long enough to remember that, yes, that _is_ what Dana called him. _He might come back. No one needs to see me crashing headfirst into another panic attack. Never again. _“If I’m going to be trouble. You… I can stop.”

In the first moment, nothing

Dana bites down on her throat in the next, vicarious frustration rushing in to boil that cold back down to nothing.

“Ow! What the fuck?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Dana says, like it really is as simple as that. She moves, easy as anything, to soothe the spot with her tongue and her lips, stray exhales dancing over Chloe’s jugular, and maybe, actually, it _is_ as simple as that. “I’ve had a restraining order for years. Voices carry like _crazy_ in that hallway, he got carted off by the cops as soon as someone heard what was happening. Besides, I’m not letting you off the hook that easily after what you finally told me, yesterday.”

Chloe falls silent. She blinks, searching her memories for what Dana might mean, but, but, _but, _Dana’s teeth are back at her throat, lips sucking, tongue lapping, all of her teasing at the still fresh not-wound, and one of her hands is worming under Chloe’s shirt, nails scratching the line of her hips up and down, back and forth, and Chloe’s ability to form coherent thought vanishes in a white-hot burst of steam somewhere under the touch. She only narrowly avoids angling her head farther back — digging her hands into Dana’s hair, and pushing her to move harder, and closer, and more, more, more — when Dana pulls away, again, as effortlessly as ever, and that hand at her hips slides up along the skin of her stomach until it’s resting on the center of her chest.

Chloe could complain. The sight in front of her kills that thought in an instant.

“…Beautiful,” she says instead. Her hands fall slow to Dana’s thighs.

Dana’s mouth quirks into a little lopsided grin. “You need to stop with that.”

“Oh?”

“Mmh. Keep it up and I might just start to believe you.”

Chloe chuckles, some trace of her confidence safely sliding back into place after nothing more than a joke and a smile. “Well. How _ever_ will I convince you it’s the truth?”

“I’m sure we can think of something.” Dana shrugs eloquently. “Hard labor, maybe.”

“Oh, obviously.”

“A written essay?”

“Sure, sure.”

“Or, more of this,” Dana smiles. Her eyes dart to Chloe’s lips before they drag a slow path back to her waiting gaze, and suddenly, suddenly, Dana is leaning down to kiss her. Gently, slowly, and again, again, she stops. Hands frozen, lips stilling, mouth close enough to taste and still far enough to be eternity.

“God damn it, what now?” Chloe groans breathlessly, hovering on some invisible ledge like she’s waiting for permission to fall.

Dana doesn’t answer, just waits, and waits, and waits, and then, “You can touch me, you know.”

It catches Chloe entirely off guard, and her hands flex where they rest. A question. _Does this not count?_

“No,” Dana answers. She pulls away fully and reaches for both of Chloe’s wrists, dragging one hand up, and up, and up, while the other moves toward her back. And, more smug, more teasing, more self-satisfied than Chloe has ever heard, she says, “_Touch me. _I’m strong, I can take it.”

_We aren’t our traumas, Chloe._

Only, really, in that moment, do the pieces of a puzzle Chloe hadn’t actually realized she was trying to solve slide into place. The reason she had been holding herself back, letting herself sidle up against the finish line without ever crossing, letting herself be thrown off balance over and over like gravity shifting beneath, and above, and side to side around her. It isn’t — wasn’t — some deference to the idea of want or being wanted like the concept itself might favor her for doing so. It wasn’t that Dana is family. It wasn’t even Rachel. It was fear. Even a month ago, it was fear. That doing anything might push Dana away. That doing anything might make her look like the same abusive monsters Dana spent so many years helping her to forget. Because so much of her life these days is pushing for more, and more, and more; pushing to take, and take, and take; desperately trying to wring every last drop out of every last interaction until it inevitably crumbles to ash.

_You too, Rachel. They don’t get to steal the credit for how strong we are._

Because she only ever learned to pull one single person back from the depths of reopened wounds. Erasing old touch with new. Replacing old _hurt_ with new. Wiping the past out of mind through the sensory overload of frantic, desperate need until nothing remains but the fresh sting of wanted pain and the dull hum of the present. Shared cigarettes, a fan in the window, and the distant tinny hum of insects singing in tune with a years old stereo.

And that isn’t…

Dana doesn’t need that.

That was never Dana’s life.

But. Then. Dana _asked. _

The least Chloe can do is answer. She squeezes her hand hesitantly over the back of Dana’s thigh and runs her thumb experimentally over the shape of Dana’s ribs.

Dana smiles brighter than the sun, a static shock of air zapped away and pure bright, bright, everything, everything, _everything _in the world that might matter condensed down to the way she gasps; the curve of her lips and the light shimmering through the deep ocean blue of her eyes. She gives a satisfied little roll of her hips and Chloe’s entire sense of balance condenses itself into the sensation of Dana grinding closer and closer before it throws itself hard against the wall. She catches the ends of Chloe’s shirt, drags it higher, and higher, and higher like maybe she’s trying to say that there isn’t anything else _left_ to say, that maybe it’s okay to want in all the ways she’s spent so long burying down out of fear because Chloe couldn’t ever hurt her like this. Not ever like this.

Chloe’s stomach chooses then to growl out a very firm disagreement.

The mood bursts into nothing, and soon Dana is taking in the blank look on her face and cackling straight from the gut, falling forward to tuck the sound into Chloe’s shoulder

“Okay,” Dana says, gasping for air between trembling laughs. “Okay.”

“I’m gonna fucking kill my stomach,” Chloe starts before a single slender finger comes to rest on her lips.

A smile presses firm to the pulse of her throat, and Dana says, “Make me breakfast.”

A slow beat, a calm breath, a single moment of peace and of calm. “Any requests?”

“Hmm,” Dana says, finger tapping thoughtfully against Chloe’s lips. “Dealer’s choice.”

“Ooh, trusting. That could go very bad for you.”

“What can I say? I know trustworthy when I see it.” Dana says, dragging the pad of her finger down over Chloe’s chin and her throat to trace the lines of her clavicle.

Chloe nods and lets herself float through the sensation of Dana’s touch, eyes closed, mind calm, and the taste, and the feel and the scent of her — near faded perfume and the vague pleasant something of morning, yesterday’s makeup, messy hair spilling down, and Dana’s body like a broad line of warmth down her own — carrying her in and around the shape of every passing second.

Forgoing food entirely in favor of a few more minutes of this might almost feel worth it; just a few more hours, days, weeks in bed, time spent admiring how well Dana fits into her arms and time spent searching for every little noise she might be able to pluck from Dana’s throat with nothing at her disposal but tongue, and lips, and hands.

Almost.

Her stomach growls again, and a thought jolts through her. “Oh! Oh, hold up, how do you feel about waffles?”

“…Waffles.”

“Fuckin’, yeah!” Chloe says. “I totally forgot I bought a new waffle maker the other day!”

Dana doesn’t give an answer, not really, nothing more than a bitten down smile and a quick little nod as if to say, _by all means, I think I lost this one. _It manages, still, to be enough.

In any other situation it might be embarrassing how quickly they move on, how easily abandon the potential to finally act on feelings they’ve spent so long dancing around like a pair of idiot children, but the fact remains that Dana asked. Dana wants her. She wants to stay.

~*~

Chloe has things more or less set up at one of the kitchen counters by the time Dana makes her way downstairs. A quick phone call to explain things to her neighbor, she said. Just a minute, she said. Quick came and went _several_ minutes ago, but Chloe would never complain. Not about that. Not to her. Especially not after Dana slides in behind her, arms wrapped as tight around her waist as she can manage. Chloe counts every last breath that she makes before drifting off as easy as she came, gliding wordlessly toward the fridge. One, and ten, and thirty.

“Do you mind?” Dana asks, one hand on the door. Chloe shakes her head. A smile lights up the room in the beat before Dana pulls out a few plastic containers of berries and the can of Reddi-wip Rachel bought on the whims of a craving right before she vanished, and Dana dumps the haul neatly, respectfully, too, too politely onto the island.

“Oh, good idea,” Chloe says almost cheerfully. She doesn’t mention Rachel.

_I miss your voice._

Dana hums, popping a single blueberry into her mouth as she slides out the chair nearest to Chloe. “I saw these last night. We’re doing this properly if we’re doing it at all.”

And, well, there’s really no way to argue with that.

After, they fall into an easy enough rhythm. Cooking and coffee, talking, and laughing, and joking like the ease of a life Chloe never had the chance to live condensed down into one single morning. Effortless small talk half-floating through her ears as the stack of waffles grows. As Dana makes a point to pick at each and every new addition like she isn’t wearing the most innocent expression in the world. Half-registered, half-answered, half-given stories about how Dana found her way here, about the evidence of Rachel everywhere in the apartment — everywhere in Chloe’s _life_ — and about the bits and the pieces of the last decade they hadn’t ever found an excuse to share.

Chloe lets that easy feeling wash over her, and she finally feels the ground return to its right place beneath her feet, just like she smiles, and smiles, and smiles every time Dana catches her eyes.

Just like she smiles when she finally sits down and feels herself being pulled in toward Dana’s shoulder.

She smiles. At that. At the way Dana’s skin feels against her cheek. The way it rumbles through her entire body when Dana hums, proud of their work, that stack of waffles prettied up and drenched in more sugar than Chloe has seen on one plate in years.

And.

Then.

The front door swings open. Time swerves, and stumbles, and skids its way into a crash.

“Chloooeee,” comes a ragged, worn out moan from the body standing there, luggage dropped unceremoniously at her sides as she fumbles to kick her way out of her shoes. She’s not looking, barely still standing, strawberry blonde hair tied up loose and eyes closed tight in some half-asleep daze now that she’s finally, finally, home, and Chloe barely has time to parse that she’s looking at _Rachel_ before that last shoe comes free and she starts shuffling over toward the kitchen.

Chloe scrambles out of her chair wide-eyed and frantically takes two long, awkward strides closer. And then she freezes up.

_Dana._

She can’t bring herself to look, can’t bring herself to speak, because Rachel is talking again, mumbling in that same breathless run-on sentence of a tone, “You didn’t answer my texts so I know you have no clue what I’m talking about, but I wanted to surprise you by getting home a few days early, so I secretly rescheduled my flight home, and oh my _god _it was the worst time of my entire fucking life, you can not even _begin_ to imagine what it’s like to hear a baby cry for so many hours, I didn’t even know they _could_.” Arms stretched out, some sleepy gesture of _please pick me up before I fall asleep,_ Rachel adds, “I can’t do more stairs, carry me.”

Chloe doesn’t answer. She can barely manage a word.

Though, not one to be deterred by the silence, Rachel grumbles, “Lazy. Goblin. Baby, I am literally dying over here, help me,” as she climbs Chloe’s body like a tree until she’s tangled up and wrapped tight around her, arms latched around the back of her neck and legs squeezing tight at her waist, and Chloe has no choice anymore but to listen.

Something squeaks against the tile floor, and Chloe whips around to see Dana staring back at her.

“Dana — ”

“It’s okay,” she says, and Chloe _knows_ it isn’t okay, because she sounds _embarrassed_, and hurt, full of some distraught something making her eyes go dull as they dart off toward the door and it’s _her_ fault. Her fault. She did that. “I… I think I misread a lot of this. You two have fun.”

“You didn’t — Dana!” Chloe tries again, louder, and she takes a step forward before being confronted with the weight of the body with her arms.

“Aw, I miss Dana,” mumbles Rachel. She nuzzles into Chloe’s neck with a moan like hours of travel ceasing to matter because she is _home. _“We should see how she’s doing.”

Dana doesn’t answer, and Chloe can feel herself ready to shatter to pieces, torn between the sight of her leaving and the feeling of Rachel in her arms. _She’s here, she’s leaving, she’s leaving, she’s leaving, she’s finally, finally here _like a chorus in her mind.

Dana doesn’t answer, and Chloe watches in silence as she gathers up the few things she brought with her and slips out the door.

Dana doesn’t answer, and Chloe misses her chance to call after her again.

She tries anyway.

“Dana!”

“_Yeah, Dana,_” Rachel whispers, lips dragging against Chloe’s neck with every word as she finally drifts off to sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I couldn’t begin to imagine why, big, blue and scary.”
> 
> “No,” Chloe says. “Don’t get me wrong, people complimented the two of us all the time. Just not that way. I got way more _are you in a band? Is that one of your groupies?_”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was not supposed to take an extra week to finish. This chapter was also not supposed to end up nearly 10k words long, but here I am: the clown that wrote a final chapter just about twice the length of everything beforehand.
> 
> Enjoy, I guess! Every character in this story is a disaster.

_Numb. The first word to enter Chloe’s mind after the whirlwind of disaster she failed to chart a path through: numb. _

_Her arms — comes the rest of that thought short seconds later — are incredibly numb._

_She shoves the feeling abruptly to the side. Long enough to wonder whether simply turning around might be all it takes to find a better way; to find the steps she should have taken; the things she should have said; the specific series of choices that might have led to all things turning out somewhere closer to okay. _

_But that thought escapes, washed away in the current of another. What would ‘okay’ really be? A happy reunion? A threesome? Maybe this is it. Maybe this, painful as it is, is it._

_“Chlo,” Rachel rasps in her sleep, wriggling somewhere closer to comfort. Arms squeezing, hands tapping, fingers scratching at the fuzz on the back of her neck._

_Chloe nuzzles against the top of her head without so much as a word. She breathes deep, and Rachel barely still smells like herself — thoroughly erased by the suffocating mix of airport bourbon, stale fast food, and something Chloe doesn’t have the presence of mind to describe any way other than sick baby — but somehow, past it all, she does. Still, she does. Chloe presses her lips harder to Rachel’s scalp when she finds it. A kiss. Not. Almost. Always._

_Maybe this is it._

_Rachel coos out some incoherent noise of satisfaction, and somehow, somehow, it is all Chloe needs to find a smile. Somehow, it is the only thing in the world Chloe needs to find strength to speak._

_“I missed you,” she breathes, a whisper trembling as it leaps from the edge of a sigh. “I missed you.”_

_Dry, chapped lips press to the curve of her neck._

_A laugh, wet with unshed tears and the newly lost weight of relief._

_Grumbling, and moaning, and giving voice to the strain of a stretch. A kiss. Another._

_“I missed you, too.”_

_Chloe isn’t quite sure how they end up back in the bedroom. She isn’t sure why the bed is properly made, why all evidence of last night, of this morning, and everything in between is gone like it was never there to exist at all._

_But she is sure of this: the weight of Rachel in her arms. The taste of Rachel on her tongue. The way Rachel opens her eyes, slowly, slowly, slowly smiling that tired half-smile. The one she’s worn a thousand times before. Only for her. Only ever for her. Only ever on late night early morning nothings like these where time ceases to matter because the only thing in the world is everything they can see; is them, them, them._

_“Bed?” Rachel asks. Her eyes drift closed and her head tips back, lazy punctuation to the question. Lazy beginnings for so many others. Are we there? Are you coming? If I fall, will you follow?_

_Yes, Chloe thinks. Always._

_“Yeah. Bed.”_

~*~

~*~

Things have been quiet.

Things are _never _quiet after Rachel comes home.

Chloe exhales slowly. She’s using Rachel’s bare thigh like a pillow, and her cheek is almost definitely stuck — sweat-slick, slick-slick bad ideas made in the exhausted, boneless aftermath of bad ideas that kept on for hours, and hours, and hours — but she doesn’t particularly care to test the idea. The sheets are bunched up somewhere near her ankles at the foot of the bed, their clothes and the comforters lost to the floor almost as soon as they started. Streams of sleepy sunset light bleed in through the windows, countless rays of liquid glow spilling over every detail of Rachel’s body as Chloe traces the ridge of her hips up and down, up and down.

Somewhere further up the bed, Chloe can hear the faint sounds of humming. A tune she doesn’t know, has never heard, eyes gently closed and the faintest of smiles pulling at the corners of Rachel’s lips as she runs fingers over Chloe’s scalp. Up and down, forward and back, over and over like tracing out the shape of every one of her adventures through the space between each individual strand of hair.

“We should redye your hair soon, your roots are coming back in,” Rachel says, rough and scratchy with too many kinds of exhaustion.

Chloe adjusts herself, angles her head back far enough to at least look in the general direction of Rachel’s face. Her cheek peels away like the faintly chilling tickle of an old band-aid. “You’re not even looking.”

“I don’t need to be.”

“Oh, do tell,” Chloe says, and Rachel scratches her nails lightly where they sit in response. _Impatient, _they tease.

“Your hair’s always softer when it starts growing back,” Rachel answers, matter of fact. “I’ll set up an appointment later. Tomorrow.”

“Mmh.”

“Anyway, not important. Get back up here. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Chloe doesn’t answer. She shakes her head faintly and returns to running patterns over the shape of Rachel’s hips. Too much is wrong. Too much to explain in a single sentence, and she would never insult Rachel by saying _nothing_ when she’s already figured out enough to ask.

“Baby, no,” adds Rachel, a little softer, a little harder to hear, and Chloe instinctively meets her eyes when she pushes herself up to rest on elbows. “Don’t start ignoring me. You’ve already been like a six out ten all day.”

It takes a frankly embarrassing stretch of time before Chloe registers the words. They come individually, one after the other after the other, crashing up against some invisible wall. A paper jam of thoughts rushing to be seen and catching on nothing at the very last second.

“Okay,” she says, scrambling up to Rachel’s level. “First of all, I have never been a six in my life.”

“Well, today you have been a _very _solid six.”

“Eat me.”

“There’s my Chlo,” Rachel snorts, and, always one step ahead, always ready for anything Chloe might say, pulls her in for a kiss. “Get over here, you idiot.”

Tongue, and teeth, and smiles, and smiles, and smiles until Chloe finds the strength to say, “Asshole.”

“Hmm,” Rachel answers as she throws herself gracefully back onto the pillows. “Gonna tell me what’s wrong yet? I can keep going as long as you need. We still have a few hours until tomorrow.”

“Mmh,” Chloe grunts. Not quite close enough to a yes to be a yes, but close enough to be enough. Close enough to say _I’m thinking about it. _“You remember Dana, right? The one we grew up with.”

“I am almost entirely sure we both mentioned her by name this morning, yes. Big Sis Dana.”

“I,” Chloe says, and stops, the rest of her sentence choked off at the realization that Rachel still has that ridiculous nickname rattling around in her head after all these years. It was some inside joke, at the time, between the two of them. Rachel had _tried_ to explain the next night. Something about being snowed in together, a daytime Big Bang Theory marathon and being too high to get off the couch or find the remote and free themselves from their self-made hell. “Yeah. Sure. Her.”

“Of course I do. She’s family.”

And she is, but…

Chloe stares deep into Rachel’s eyes. Searching blindly for the right words. Hoping to find them in time. Hoping Rachel might find them instead.

“Oh,” Rachel whispers, and maybe she has.

Chloe breathes deep.

“_Oh,_” Rachel says again.

“Feel free to stop at any time.”

“Oh. My _god. _That was _her._”

“Rachel,” Chloe warns.

“Well, fuck!” Rachel half shouts, smiling and not around the potential of too many partially formed thoughts to count. “Why didn’t you tell me, you ass?” She slaps Chloe gently on the chest, and Chloe catches herself wondering dimly whether it might be one of those _things_ where the thought counts more than the lazy little tap. “Now I’m the bad guy here!”

“You’re not — ”

Rachel slaps her again. This time on the shoulder. This time every bit as empty, every bit as meaningless, at odds with the look of only just barely restrained joy on her face. “I am! You absolute ass!”

“Rach, you’re not the one she’s mad at right now, trust me,” Chloe tries again, grabbing at Rachel’s wrist to cut off the next attempt before it starts. But Rachel wriggles her way free, because she would always have found a way, and because really, really, Chloe wasn’t holding on all that tight. It isn’t much longer before the next slap lands somewhere near her hairline and stays, unmoving in its new place.

“I am! And you’re still an ass! I know that face! That’s not your usual face; you’ve got feelings! Why the fuck would you let me swoop in to steal you away like some evil fairy tale witch right as Dana sets herself up for a home run? She’s gonna think I’m a bitch!”

“Mixing your metaphors a bit there, Rach,” Chloe says, and Rachel does not answer. The smile wipes itself away in an instant, and she _glares. _Sighing and dragging a hand down her face, Chloe pushes on, “You know, if anything, calling her Big Sis Dana after all this time is probably the thing that makes you look like an ass.”

“That nickname is precious, don’t you start with me,” Rachel snaps, even as her fingers start stroking their way through Chloe’s hair. Even as she drags Chloe back and down into bed, anger long gone from them both. Already replaced with endless, endless nothing. “And, they — not metaphors. Similes. And you’re still an ass.”

Chloe doesn’t know how to answer that. So, she doesn’t. She pulls Rachel close.

“You need to tell me about these things, Chlo,” Rachel whispers so softly that Chloe almost misses it completely, her voice nothing more than air brushing over skin. Faint traces of ghosts; empty husks of past hurt dug out too many times to count, too many times to ever find use again. “We promised, remember?”

“Yeah,” Chloe sighs. They did. They did. “I just…” She inhales, long and slow; exhales twice as fast; rinse, and repeat, and again, and again, and again. She groans as she lets Rachel go. She stretches uselessly for words utterly, hopelessly out of reach. She digs the heels of her palms into her eyes, hard, and harder still. “I don’t — I just… I _missed you. _We were having a weird, good morning, and I thought I was finally… But then you were there, and I didn’t know what the fuck to do. We’ve never, like… _This. _You know?”

“Baby,” Rachel whispers, comfort laced through every letter.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Chloe croaks. “But like, not her either. Not over something this stupid,”

She stops and sighs. She groans her frustration again. A childish answer. A childish worry. Rachel has known what Chloe was up to ever since it first started. Before it first started. Before even Chloe could put words to the things she was doing. It hurt to find out, and it hurt worse to see Rachel encourage it, all tear-lined smiles and _maybe this is just our next step, maybe distance is how we fix us, _and Chloe wanted so badly to argue — _god _did she want to argue — but Rachel was _calm_. Rachel was _happy_. And Chloe only ever learned to fight with Rachel when death had deigned to grab one of them by the ankle and pull them down just another inch closer.

Unhealthy methods for healing to pair perfectly with the rest.

_If you’re the one hurting me, I know I’ll be safe._

Nails tap lightly at the base of Chloe’s throat and her awareness returns at once, sight filled to the brim with strawberry blonde dyed gold with the sun; bright hazel eyes sparkling bright, and that easy, easy smile like nothing in the world could ever stay secret, ever stay hidden, ever be brave or be strong in the darkness beyond reach.

“It’s real this time, huh,” says Rachel.

Chloe nods silently.

Rachel hums.

“Well,” she says with a flourish of her hands. “I’m not leaving no matter how much you beg. You and me against the world isn’t going to end just because you finally found something more than a way to kill a few weeks, alright? You’re mine. I’m yours. _Chloe and Rachel_ is forever, bitch. Etcetera.”

Finally, finally, finally, Chloe smiles. She laughs, barely on the edge of it when she says, “You’re an absolute fucker, you know that?”

“I am, I am. Thank you so much for noticing.”

“Mmh. I love you, though. Dumbass.”

“Okay, no. Nope. We’re not starting that right now. I’m running on adrenaline and post-orgasm glow, and I can feel a crash coming on — ”

“Now that you mention it, you _are _glowing.”

“ — Thank you, I know. Anyway, unless you want me to start deliriously monologuing at you like we’re in the last half hour of a romance movie, stop encouraging me right this second.”

A light and effortless chuckle takes Chloe over before she can stop it. “Maybe I want to hear it,” she says, more and more dramatic, dipping further into her mother’s southern accent with every new word. All the warmth of a neutral ground that they could never bring themselves to let go. “Let me live out my fantasy of being the damsel in distress just this once, Miss Amber. Please, take me into your strong arms.”

Rachel snorts and swallows down a cackle. She blinks away tears, an emotion sitting somewhere near the bittersweet realization that they are really, really doing this, and, settling back into Chloe’s arms; back beneath the sheets; back tangled together with the ease of endless, countless lifetimes, Rachel says, “Fine. Just know you asked for it.”

Rachel doesn’t laugh, but Chloe does. The faintest rise and fall of her chest, the barest shake of her shoulders as she butts her cheek against the top of Rachel’s head.

“…It kills me every day that I can’t be there for you like I used to, you know.”

“Mhm. But you’re living your dream, Rach. Don’t ever worry about leaving me behind.”

“I worry every about it every single god damn day, you moron.” Rachel says, firmly, bitterly. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d never have been dragged halfway down the coast just to get abandoned in some obnoxiously huge apartment with exposed pipes on the ceiling. I still don’t have a single fucking clue how to decorate this place, by the way.”

“Not that I don’t love every reminder you have even less love for your money than me — ”

“You’re welcome.”

“ — but I’m not feelin’ particularly swept off my feet here.”

“Oh, is the big romantic gesture you specifically asked for a let down? Am I disappointing you?”

“Just a bit.”

“_Eat me,_” Rachel says, and nips at Chloe’s clavicle just light enough to tickle. Just hard enough to fill the room with laughter strong enough to feel like it never left.

“Anyway.” Chloe kisses Rachel’s hairline. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d have turned up dead in a ditch by twenty. You’re my angel.”

“Aww,”

“You’re also officially behind on romantic gestures, that’s one for me.”

Rachel wisely ignores the joke entirely, instead pushing ahead to ask, “Do you ever think about the time after we left?”

_Always,_ Chloe thinks, _every single day._ “Yeah,” she says. “We were good like that.”

“We _looked _good like that,” Rachel says, and hums, and it is somehow, somehow, all it takes to send Chloe wandering aimlessly down a trail of happy memories. Days, and days, and days spent hiding out in nothing motels in the middle of nowhere, desperately hoping to stay undisturbed because they were alive, and safe, and overflowing with a need to prove it to themselves over, and over, and over again. Nights on the coast, big city lights, and big city life. Picturesque sunrises and sunsets; the ocean shining gold, and red, and orange like all the warmth of imagined futures shining just past the windows. Abandoned supermarket parking lots, seas of concrete pale and cracked in the sun, and cell towers on the edges of towns only barely disguised like palm trees, carrying whispers of _welcome home, welcome home _in the breeze.

They _did_ look good like that. Unburdened by stress. Flying forward through a tailwind of youth and unfamiliar freedom. It was only fair, Chloe knows now just like she knew back then, that it had to end so soon. Admission to the rest of the world would never have stopped time.

“Did we?” Chloe teases anyway, with a steady, knowing smirk. “Did we, though?”

“Yes. Everyone said so. All the time.”

“Everyone,” Chloe echoes, still smiling, still smiling.

“Yes, _everyone. _No one ever said it to you?”

“Nope.”

“I couldn’t _begin_ to imagine why, big, blue and scary.”

“No,” Chloe says. “Don’t get me wrong, people complimented the two of us all the time. Just not that way. I got way more _are you in a band? Is that one of your groupies?_”

“…You _didn’t._”

“_Why are you spending so much time with that Radio Shack employee?_”

Rachel gasps, the noise almost dripping with sarcasm, and she slaps Chloe on the chest. “_Radio Shack! _Not even something that still exists? Like, I’m at _least_ some kind of supermarket employee, come _on._”

“Nope. Rachel Amber: Radio Shack cashier.”

“Radio — Chloe Price, I am a _model._”

“You _are _a fuckin’ model.”

“I’m a fucking model!” Rachel says, then. She’s giggling as she does, confident and sure, pushing herself up to make _sure_ she’s looking down as she leans closer, closer, and closer, and Chloe shuts her eyes to it all with a grin. Rachel stops when she notices. At the last second, just as her lips brush against Chloe’s. She waits, and she waits, and she asks, “…Hey.”

The grin doesn’t fade. Chloe’s eyes don’t open. But she tilts her head back, she lets her lips brush again with Rachel’s. “Hm?”

“Let’s go somewhere together,” Rachel says. “Just us. We’ve got a lot to sort through, and it’s not getting done here.”

“In fairness, nothing’s gotten done here since we moved in.”

“My point, Priceless.”

The change in Rachel’s voice; that sudden return to lightness and ease is what finally convinces Chloe to open her eyes. She finds it there, too, hazel sparkling warm with some emotion close enough to happiness that it might easily share the name, and still far away, so far away, blanketed in the pain of the admission that this day so strongly refuses to hear: after so much time, and so much love, and so much hurt, _this_ is their end.

Chloe always expected it to come with more of a bang. One final ghost from the past refusing to leave them alone, maybe.

They never would have ended that way. Not really. Not after so many good years of loving, and healing, and _living. _Maybe this is their real reward for escaping the hell of their childhoods. Maybe more good times than they know what to do with and an ending that offers the chance for fresh beginnings is it. Rachel and Chloe might be done, but Rachel is still here, and Chloe is still here, and maybe, maybe, just maybe, they can use this chance to build something new.

“Mmh. Where you thinking?” Chloe asks.

“Paris. Tokyo. London. Some shitty motel in the ass crack of Australia — I don’t _care. _Anywhere you want, Chlo. I just want to… I don’t know — fuck out the last of our feelings? Figure out how to have a proper breakup? Go on one more adventure with you? Take your pick.”

“Dana — ”

“Go _fix _things with Dana, you moron. Not that I’d say no, but this isn’t an invitation to run away from all of our problems and start over fresh.”

It sounds, for a moment, like it might be as simple as that.

“Fine. Okay. Dana, then some swanky French hotel.” Chloe says. Because it really _is_ as simple as that.

“Hm,” Rachel says thoughtfully as she tucks herself back into Chloe’s arms. “I was expecting Tokyo from you, honestly.”

“Well hell, if you don’t like that answer, we can always try somewhere else. Florida, even.”

“God. Chloe, no.”

Chloe chuckles. She looks into Rachel’s eyes as she rolls them both carefully, carefully over. Tears are there, glistening at the edges. Barely noticeable. Barely more than a trick of the light. But Chloe sees. And she understands. Things haven’t been okay in a long time — band-aids and duct tape patchwork only hide the real issues for so long, after all — but right now, they feel close enough, and time to themselves, time far away from here to give this chapter of their lives the ending it’s needed for far too long…

“I don’t care where we go. As long as it’s together.”

It all sounds like a pretty good reward for surviving.

“Now,” says Chloe, a quick kiss to the tip of Rachel’s nose. “We’re not done here until you take back that shit about me being a six.”

Each and every wave of deep, from-the-gut laughter that follows; each and every surprised squeal of joy that fills the room as Chloe moves, makes their apartment feel like home in a way it hasn’t in almost long enough to forget.

~*~

If Chloe was a betting woman, she might have been willing, in the aftermath and the afterglow of her day with Rachel, to put some money on having _the Dana situation_ wrapped up in time for a date. Drive over to her place, make some big, dramatic speech about why she should just not worry so much about what she saw, because she didn’t see anything other than Rachel being Rachel, and she _knows_ what Rachel is like, because she grew up with Rachel, too, and, _hey, how about dinner?_

At the time, it seemed like a good bet to make.

It was not.

It was not, and now Chloe is back at work. Her shift is almost over. A day and another have come and gone, and she accomplished absolutely nothing other than to lose her jacket for the second time in a month.

“God damn it,” Chloe mumbles, patting at her chest as if it might have crumpled itself up to fit in a pocket, scanning through the cheap plastic shelving hidden underneath the front counter. “How the fuck does this always happen?” She storms away and throws open the side door to the garage, yells toward the break room, uncaring of the few others there, and working, and for whatever reason still unfamiliar enough with what she’s like to actually be surprised. “Luke! Where the fuck is my jacket?”

The older ones — every caricature of mechanics condensed down and spread across two grease stained shirts — have seen enough by now to stay unaffected.

“Door! It’s always the door, Chloe!”

Chloe looks. It is, in fact, hanging on the doorknob. She shoves herself into the sleeves and steps back into the lobby.

Where she is greeted by Max Caulfield.

Max Caulfield, whose arms are covered in stray stains of old ink all the way up to the shoulders of her tank top. Max Caulfield, who may as well be a walking air freshener, covering up the old moldy _something _lingering in the air. Max Caulfield, who very much does not own a car.

She’s waiting with hands laced together behind her back, the spitting image of a perfect, patient customer but for the smile like mischief incarnate splitting her face. “Seems I ran into some car trouble, miss,” she says, grinning, and grinning, and grinning. The star of a joke no one told Chloe she was meant to be in on.

Still, Chloe nods. She folds her arms over her chest and gives Max the best attempt at a serious expression she can manage. “Uh huh.”

“The uh, engine.”

“Sure.”

“Carburetor.”

“Yeah, obviously.”

“Wiper fluid… Spark — spark plugs.”

“Max.”

“That’s actually all I had time to look up on the way over here.”

“Max, you don’t own a car.”

“Really?” Max asks, and she at least has the decency to look genuinely surprised as she throws a glance out the window. Some refusal to let the act to end, like she fully expects to see a car parked and waiting. “That must be why all the problems!”

Chloe steps out from behind the counter and joins Max in the open space of the lobby. “Mmh.”

“I didn’t drive, don’t worry. The buses are like _weirdly_ on schedule today,” Max says. Chloe does not answer. She stares like there’s another half to the joke, because there is absolutely another half to the joke. “Rach called me. She was… Well, I don’t know. I’ve never heard her like that. But, she said you were going through _some relationship shit_, and that you might have a thing or two you wouldn’t feel comfortable venting to her about.”

“_Jesus,_ with you two. Always trying to double team me and my problems.”

Chloe barks out a laugh. Barely, barely, she can taste bitterness rising in the back of her throat over the knowledge that Rachel thought to involve herself this far. It isn’t true. It isn’t, and won’t be, and she stopped being the scared, insecure teenager that might believe it is _years _ago, but it feels a little like Rachel pushing her away. Like Rachel _wants_ her gone, and wants her gone faster.

It figures, she supposes, that the insecurities from their start would come back to cause trouble in their end.

But then, and it’s always that, and it always has been with them: but this, but that, but then, it’s hard to let that bitterness grow when the truth is that she _could_ use this chance. A pointless, one-sided argument with someone who always listens, and always helps, and never, never, never puts up with her shit. The chance to feel some stupid, pointless anger about nothing at all until there’s nothing left in her to accidentally throw in Dana’s face.

“Fun imagery,” Max says, blinking away a faint wave of very real surprise. “And anyway, you love us. You’d never get anything done if we weren’t around to keep your pouting on the rails.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking, and I don’t think I like this new bossy Max. I might be a shitty influence on you.”

“_Please,_ I’ve had you wrapped around my finger since the first day we met. Rachel’s the one who taught me what to do with it.”

“Well, she and I are gonna have words. I miss the old shy Max.”

It’s somewhere in the middle of that; in the middle of watching Max smile like the perfect mirror image to Rachel’s lifetime of scheming, that Chloe realizes, maybe, maybe the next chapter in their lives has started without her.

They haven’t been living the story of _Chloe and Rachel_ for a long, long time, and it was Max: little bucket of freckles and nerves Max — _never Maxine, it makes me sound like the rich girl who terrorized me as a kid_ — Caulfield who changed that; who brought out the best in them. Maybe it’s only fair they managed to bring out the best in her, too. Maybe it’s only fair that Chloe is the last to realize things have changed.

“Let’s grab dinner. My treat,” says Max, beaming like the sun.

~*~

There is something to be said for Max’s ability to find so many amazing places to eat and to drink as often as she does. There’s even more to be said for the fact that they’re all _good._ Luck like that feels almost supernatural at times, and Chloe has — more than a few drinks in — asked more than she cares to admit whether Max is a time traveler, because there is _no _other explanation on this earth that makes sense.

Every single time she slips up and lets it happen, Max smiles like someone blessed with a secret she knows will never be found out, content to stay speechless and watch until she absolutely can’t any longer. Every single time, Max deflects, worthless non-answers like _oh, a client recommended the place, _or _they had good reviews on Yelp._

They never do. Chloe always checks.

Today is no exception.

By the time they’re inside, Chloe is almost positive the place doesn’t exist on any map in the world. It’s a diner like any other, trapped in time, coated at once with the shine of the present and the dust of long years of neglect. A tiny CRT television is mounted in one of the corners opposite their booth, vertically scrolling lines of static perpetually interrupting the rhythm of the news. And, it’s always the news. Always in places like these. Always the same ability to pull up some local station no one has ever heard of, like the ghost that haunts these places into existence does the same for the nameless, faceless broadcasters talking to nowhere and everywhere, all over the country.

The smalltalk Chloe and Max had going like an active barrier against real subjects of conversation, real problems, and real life died and died further with the start and the stop of Chloe’s search for information. It always does. She gets too into unraveling the unsolvable mysteries that Max lays out for her own good. Max lets her. Max _always_ lets her. Pride, Chloe thinks, that she’ll never be found out.

“Hey,” Chloe says then, grasping desperately for something new to discuss before the silence turns stale and sets her back to thinking about the reason they’re here at all.

“Hmm?”

“…Why did we never work out?”

Somewhere in the back of Chloe’s mind, she can hear the faint sounds of herself calling herself an idiot.

Max, too, snorts like she hadn’t expected inevitability to come knocking so soon, and says, “You don’t want to know the answer to that.”

“I do though,” Chloe says, “It’s either that or we start talking about Dana, and the poor waitress gets to saunter on over here with the coffee right in the middle of me saying some shit about how much time I’ve spent drooling over Dana’s tits. Because oh my _god, _Max. Oh my god. I want to suffocate in those things.”

The poor waitress chooses exactly then to saunter on over with the coffee.

She at least has the decency to wordlessly laugh it off and let Max take the entire pot off her hands.

“You see what you do?” Max croaks, only just barely hiding the beginnings of a rapidly darkening flush behind a hand. “Look, Chloe, I spent all day doing linework on someone’s back, and I need energy before I — ” Max stops and turns suddenly to the waitress. “ — Thank you, by the way. And, I’m so sorry for her. We’ll both have the bacon cheeseburger.”

“I don’t _want _a burger,” Chloe says almost reflexively.

Max, then, calmly and carefully fills up both mugs with coffee. The first, she slides over to Chloe’s side of the table. The second, she fills and lifts to her mouth. She takes a very steady, very large gulp, and she stares Chloe down, only faintly gasping for air as she finishes. “You’re gonna have the burger, Chloe. Call it the price of admission for making me have this conversation about how horny you are in front of a stranger.”

The waitress smiles. Chloe pouts.

“Fine,” she says, folding her arms and throwing herself against the bench entirely too hard. Her head bangs into the divider.

When they’re alone again, Max shuts down almost entirely. She buries herself in her phone until their food arrives, and no matter how badly Chloe wants to be upset about it, Max deserves the bit of quiet. It’s too easy to forget that Max isn’t her. She isn’t Rachel. Lack of shame is their thing, and no matter how much Max has changed in the time they’ve known each other, and no matter how much easier it is when they’re both drunk, that easy sense of embarrassment is still a huge part of her.

The frustration comes anyway. It never was one to listen to logic.

Chloe spends long minutes funneling the feeling as far away from her vocal cords as she can manage; into restless hands tapping at bouncing knees.

“So,” Max says, finally, after the strain of existing in proximity to Chloe’s movement becomes too much, too fast. “The new girl.”

“Dana.”

“Dana, sure,” Max sighs, and smiles. She looks tired, but it’s a return to her usual tired. The _always_ tired that Max wears like and old coat; like it’s just who she is: a perfectionist to a fault, someone who thrives in the process of things and loses herself so constantly in her work that it’s a miracle anyone has ever pulled her back out. “Rach didn’t tell me much, but she _did _say you scared the new girl off by never mentioning that you lived together.”

“Fuck,” Chloe bites, new frustration already stubbornly bubbling back to the surface. “I shouldn’t _have _to mention her. Rachel and I are a package deal! Dana grew up with us, she should know that by now.”

Max exhales sharply, loud enough to be a snort. “No, no. Jesus, Chloe. You and _I_ are a package deal; you’re stuck with me forever whether you like it or not. You and Rachel are in a long-term relationship.”

Chloe frowns.

“And, like, _everyone _has secrets,” Max goes on. “But that’s one _I _never signed up for, since you asked. I bet Dana didn’t, either.”

The frown deepens.

“Generally, I find most people aren’t actually hoping to be the unwitting final piece in a quirky little polycule.”

Because the frown isn’t enough, Chloe growls. It doesn’t work. Max lights up the instant she hears the sound, more than a few notches happier for nothing but having played witness. “Big and scary, big and scary,” she trails off as she reaches across the table for Chloe’s still untouched coffee. “You’re so _sensitive_ today.”

Almost immediately, Chloe deflates. Emotion shot toward gone in the space of an exhale because Max is doing that _thing_ Rachel taught her when no one was looking: shining a light on Chloe’s behavior. Grabbing her problems by the throat and slapping them down on the table for the world to see.

_Things don’t get easy until you work through the hard, Chloe._

One of these days she’ll manage to remember that lesson.

“I really hate you sometimes,” Chloe says, just as their waitress arrives with their food. Their conversation hits pause. Plates clatter. The silence parts for a _thank you,_ for a _no, we’re fine._

“No one hates me, I’m adorable,” Max shoots back around a mouthful of burger, once they’re finally alone with the quiet again.

Chloe lets that be the end of it. She sinks back in her seat and lets her eyes fall closed, breathing in the atmosphere as Max eats, and eats, and eats. It’s peaceful. It almost feels like that place back in Arcadia; the one from back when her childhood still felt like a childhood; the one that shut down the year after her dad died and got replaced with an IHOP like maybe he was the sole force keeping _good_ alive and well.

Chloe sighs. “I have to explain Rachel.”

It isn’t a question.

She’s going to have to explain more than Rachel. Ten years of codependency borne from lives like nightmares crashing and burning because time, and peace, and quiet gave them the space to grow into different people. Ten years of slowly, slowly, slowly coming to terms with the idea that she might be more than a desire to keep Rachel safe, keep her happy, keep her smiling long enough to grasp every single dream she ever had the audacity to dream. Ten years of turning around in slow motion to find youth passed by without so much as a _fuck you _to pair with the realization that no one ever taught them how to be adult, just like no one ever let them be children. The world spit them out somewhere in the between with nothing but each other to help fill in the gaps of their fractured, broken selves, just like the world saw them healed and whispered _what now, what next, what now, _as the pettiest kind of revenge.

“You do,” Max’s plate scrapes dully against the table.

Chloe is going to have to explain more than she’s capable of explaining.

The bell above the front door rings, loud footsteps and chatter of a crowd trailing behind.

“How the fuck do I explain Rachel?” Chloe asks. She opens her eyes. Max is staring, smiling, arms folded on the table, and all of her full to the brim with something that almost, almost, almost feels something like pity.

~*~

She’ll end up having to walk, but Chloe lets Max borrow her truck to get home. Walk, or call Rachel, or deal with a midnight Uber by the time she finally gets around to _wanting_ to head home. In the meantime, she needs the space to herself. Time alone to wander. Time alone to clear her head.

It almost works.

Despite the effort, she doesn’t end up anywhere but lost in a corner of town that feels vaguely familiar at best. The end of her night signaling to come home early, maybe. But then, maybe it isn’t. She steps inside the next bar she sees: some run down place on a street corner with a single neon sign stripped of whatever logo might have once been. _Have a few drinks, _she thinks, _just a few. Home can go back to being a problem for later._

She only realizes where she is when she pushes open the front doors.

As full as it is, the place is almost unrecognizable — customers at every table, every booth, and up and down half the bar — the bartender, however, is not.

“Welcome back!” She says, out of place as ever, maybe even more so tonight in that intangible way of things when simple, easy joy butts up against a room full of drunks until it frays at the edges.

Chloe allows herself a few more seconds of staring blankly before stepping out of the doorway. “Juliet, right?”

“Ooh, look at you, got it in one! No friend tonight?”

“Mmh,” Chloe grunts as she slips into a seat at the bar. “I’ll take a beer.”

“That’s too bad, you two were cute together.” Juliet smiles, and winks, and pours her drink all in one smooth motion. Glass, tap, counter. She leans across the bar, weight on her elbows.

Halfway to pulling out her wallet, Chloe freezes. She meets Juliet’s eyes very, very slowly, brows knitting together even slower in confusion. Carefully, she asks, “Flirt with every woman that comes into this place, do you?”

“Just the hot ones.”

“Ah.” Chloe pulls out a few bills and places them on the counter. She takes a sip of her beer.

“And the ones who don’t realize they’re dating my boss.”

She chokes.

“_What,_” she barely, barely manages to push through the spackled burn of her coughing fit. She slams a fist against her chest. Again. Again. “What?”

“Dana. She’s been holed up in her office for a couple days,” Juliet explains with that same charming smile, and it leads Chloe somewhere twice as lost as before. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you. End of the hall.”

Juliet doesn’t stick around to explain. Chloe doesn’t ask. If life wants her here, it’s always easier not to fight. If life wants her here, she’s not getting away. She downs her beer in seconds flat and strolls toward the back like she belongs there, but the moment she reaches for the handle, her confidence falters. Doubt scrapes steady up the back of her throat: why is she here? It couldn’t be that easy. It couldn’t be this simple. Friends orchestrating some ridiculous series of events to bring her to a happily ever after she’s never had the chance to have. Fate throwing her from one coincidence to the next until she ends up exactly where she wants to be. It couldn’t be that easy.

She knocks.

Eternity comes and goes in the time before an answer.

“Come in,” Dana commands like she knows exactly who it is, and _oh, _wouldn’t that be the world’s worst punchline to the joke of today. Chloe almost turns, and almost leaves, and almost, almost never looks back, but by the time that _almost _works its way through her mind, her hand is on the door, and she’s stepping inside.

The office is bizarrely large, given the rest of the place. Certainly big enough for two people. Big enough for a couch. A desk at the far wall faced straight at the door. One of those expensive full-height leather office chairs. The kind of setup that puts you under a microscope as soon as you enter. All the stress of a high school principal visit leaked out into the real world. Though, even despite that little detail, the office is run down. Just like the rest of the place. Just like every other back office on earth. Wood paneling that only goes up half the walls, and some old, crackling plaster up the rest. Papers, and files, and folders, and boxes, and boxes, and boxes are scattered around the corners and every last inch of free space. It’s a mess. It’s what Chloe expected.

She does not look at Dana when she says, “Your bartender — Juliet? She’s… uh.”

Dana hums her acknowledgment. Still, Chloe does not look. “You two have a tattoo artist in common. She’s been around a few times. _Loves _to talk about you.”

“Ah.”

It doesn’t answer the question in the back of Chloe’s mind, but she hadn’t expected it to. She hadn’t expected much more than a _get out._

Chloe coughs nervously. Dana does not.

“So, uh… I didn’t know this was your place.”

“Chloe.” Something clatters onto the desk. Dana sighs slowly, and for the first time, Chloe lets herself look. Her hair is immaculately done — makeup, too — but she may as well be wearing the same thing she was the last time they saw each other. Wrinkled clothes, fraying patience, tired eyes; she looks _bad._ “Go home. I’m not in the mood for a speech about how it was all a misunderstanding. I’ve had enough of those for a lifetime.”

“Good. I’m not here to give one.”

Truthfully, she still doesn’t know why, exactly, she’s here. She still doesn’t know how, exactly, she’s going to fix this. But then, knowing never got her anywhere useful. If Dana wants to believe this was all intentional, Chloe knows the rules well enough by now to play.

Suffocating silence seeps in through the cracks in the windows and the walls. Chloe lets it. She lets it build, and she lets it grow, until finally, finally the breaking point comes.

Dana shifts, barely noticeable, in her chair. A wince. Barely more. The silence breaks. “Were you two together the entire time?”

Chloe doesn’t answer. Her eyes drift back to the couch. To the wooden stool at her side, stacked high with boxes of files. She runs a finger carelessly over the cardboard rim.

“Chloe, is that a yes?”

“It’s complicated.” Because it is. It is. It _is._

“Oh,” Dana scoffs, disappointed. “It always is. Get out.”

Again, Chloe doesn’t answer. Chloe doesn’t move. She doesn’t listen. She doesn’t leave. She might not have ended up here through any greater reasoning beyond convenience and coincidence, but that doesn’t mean she’s the sort to roll over so easily. Especially not when it is — it _is — _too complicated to explain.

She might not have come here to talk, but she she’s here now. And she _wants_ to talk.

So, she does.

“Some things,” she starts, even though she knows there isn’t a single force on earth powerful enough to explain away the things she went through trying to shape herself into something close enough to human to reach this point at all. The only thing — the _only _thing — that might ever come close is to talk about Rachel. To talk about life, and love, and learning that the world is bigger than she could have ever imagined. “Some things, Dana, are just for me. I know you used to know us when we were kids, but you never _really_ knew us. You weren’t there. You don’t know what the fuck we went through, and you don’t get to act like I’m the one in the wrong when you didn’t even stick around to let me explain.”

“Then explain,” Dana says, and the way her voice drops low, nearly a whisper, is almost enough to make Chloe regret what she’s doing. But it isn’t. It _isn’t. _“You’re living together. You have _one_ bed. Explain that to me.”

Chloe _wants_ to explain. But she doesn’t.

So, Dana pushes on. “You’re allowed to keep things to yourself, Chloe. But not that.”

“Yes, _that!_” Chloe feels the words tear free from her throat entirely too loud for where they are. She doesn’t care. Out of everything in the world that she should be allowed to keep secret, her time with Rachel is at the top of the list. Revealing things she’s kept to herself for this long shouldn’t be the magic skeleton key allowing her the chance at forgiveness. “What Rachel and I have shouldn’t need a fucking explanation! Everyone keeps telling me it should, and as far as I’m concerned, everyone’s a fuckin’ jackass. Do you need me to sit you down on the couch like your therapist and go through every single terrible thing we’ve ever been through?”

“Chloe — ”

“We should be allowed a bit of proximity at this point in our lives without _you_ of all people jumping straight to thinking I’m cheating. Do you need me to walk you through the time Rachel had to Google _how to set a dislocated shoulder _at three in the morning because one of us started sleep talking just a _little _too loud? Would you get it then?”

“Chloe, that isn’t — ”

Chloe doesn’t shout, but it is a very near thing. She doesn’t stop when she sees Dana wince like she’s scared, but it is a very, very near thing.

Dana winces. Dana is _scared, _but Chloe doesn’t stop.

“It is! How about I tell you about the time I had to keep Rachel conscious for an entire night because the urgent care was closed, the hospital was too fucking far away, and Frank put her right up against an overdose out of _spite?_” A single shuddering breath interrupts Chloe’s momentum, but she forces herself ahead regardless, hands scrubbing rough down her face and rougher through her hair before she takes a single step closer. “What about — what about the week we spent hiding out in an abandoned _fucking_ junkyard a couple miles outside of town because, irony of ironies, the murder dump was the only place we were sure no one would try to kill us? Would I get a pass, then?”

This time, Dana stays quiet.

This time, Chloe stops talking. She takes back her breath, slow breaths in, slower breaths out.

“I’m sorry,” Dana says, finally, almost a whisper. It feels wrong. It _is_ wrong. It’s the kind of apology they all learned to make when fighting back and standing up only lead to danger breathing down their neck. A hopeless, last ditch effort to stay safe. A hopeless, last ditch effort to keep from needing help.

She isn’t that.

She isn’t here to become that.

“_Fuck,_” Chloe exhales all at once, stumbling her way over to the couch until she collapses to sitting somewhere in its middle. She buries her face in her palms. “Don’t. I’m being an ass.”

“Chloe — ”

“I _am._ Like, fuck, me being a bitch is kind of the running theme of my week. Don’t — don’t act like you deserved any of that.”

“You’re right, though. Who am I to step in the middle of you two?”

“Oh, shut the fuck up. You’re the person who kept us both alive, that’s who.” Chloe says, firmly meeting Dana’s gaze. “Anyway. We broke up after you ran out.”

Heartbreak floods Dana’s face in an instant. “You didn’t… Not because of…”

“Of _course_ it was because of you. Did you think I was lying the other day when I said I wasn’t messing around? It’s — she was in… Europe… Somewhere,” Chloe waves her hand dismissively. “All month. I stopped asking a few years ago. Knowing doesn’t really help with missing her, you know? But like, we’ve been in maintenance mode for forever now. Going through the motions until one of us figures out how to move on.”

“But…”

“It’s your fault it happened. Sure. Look,” Chloe says, jumping suddenly to her feet and moving closer, closer until she’s towering over her, resting one hand on either arm of Dana’s chair. _I’ll go if you tell me. I’ll stop if you want. I’ll leave and never come back; all you have to do is ask. _“We’re all shitty people. Don’t worry about it. So you caused the end of a ten… Eleven? Maybe twelve? You caused the end of a ten-something year relationship. So what? We’ve both been sleeping around forever. No one ever taught us how to do these things right. But I want to learn. For you.”

Dana does not tell her to go. She reaches up to touch the line of Chloe’s jaw, a feather-light press from the pads of her fingers, there and then gone, and she asks, “You do, huh?”

“Yeah,” Chloe says, and smiles. Dana maybe smiles, too. Maybe. “I’ll — some other time, I’ll tell you everything. Not right now, and not…” She stops and sighs, dropping slow to her knees. Her hands come to rest slowly, slowly on Dana’s thighs. “Anything you want to know about the past few years. Anything.”

At that, Dana smiles. More than a maybe. At that, her fingers card slowly through Chloe’s hair, touch searing heat along the path of Chloe’s every nerve. At that, she hums something quiet and satisfied, the sound of it enough to burn through every trace of air in Chloe’s lungs.

“Chloe,” Dana asks. “What are you doing?”

“Honestly? I don't know. I’m here on accident.”

“Hm,” Dana says. Her fingers don’t stop.

“Look, if — I’ll go, if you want me to go. But, I _really_ did not know this was your bar. You never did tell me where it was.”

A small, barely-there smirk cracks at the corners of Dana’s mouth. “Oh, sure, so the angry yelling was entirely incidental, then.”

“Isn’t it always?”

Dana breathes deep. “It _is_ always, with you…”

“Yeah,” Chloe says, hands sliding farther, up, and up along the shape of Dana’s legs, soft, soft skin giving way beneath her fingers, muscle tensing in her wake. Chloe smiles. She presses her lips to Dana’s knees, eyes still locked on hers. Always, always on hers. “So, I uh — anyway. If you mean _here_ here… Call it an apology. I should’ve told you sooner.”

“You should have.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you, either.”

“No. You shouldn’t have,” Dana sighs almost absentmindedly, spreading her legs to let Chloe work more easily at her belt. To let her pull everything down, and down, and out of the way. She watches Chloe move like it might just be the most riveting thing she’s ever seen in her life. There might, Chloe thinks, be something to dissect in that little fact. But then Dana blinks the look away, piercing heat of midnight ocean blue flashing into view where once there was calm; where once there was nothing but an unbroken teal and the still of cool curiosity.

Dana whispers, “_Well?_” as she lets her head loll back against the cushion of her chair, fingers retreading a path through Chloe’s hair — bangs to back and over again — once, and twice, and again, and again, and again.

_It can wait, it can wait, it can wait, _she says through touch.

_Show me, _comes a whisper of waves from the dark of her eyes, _what you think sorry should be._

Chloe moves her hands back up and along every inch of the newly bare skin of Dana’s legs, calloused palms dragging trails of heat like a well-controlled spark, and when Dana moans — when her hand in Chloe’s hair stills, and tenses, and the steady, rhythmic ring of hushed, airy nothings fills the room with something thicker than air — she slows just long enough for Dana to whine.

“_Shh,_” Chloe prods, smug, open-mouthed grin pressed firm to the inside of a thigh. The crowd outside roars in time with her voice. Somewhere further, laughter, excitement, oblivious noises treading paths to heard.

Dana listens. To the crowd. To Chloe. She quiets.

And Chloe pushes on. She moves, that same unbroken grin still spread ear to ear, kiss after kiss painting marks up Dana’s thighs like the world’s laziest game of connect-the-dots being set up for after. She brushes the backs of her knuckles lazily between Dana’s legs, answering movement spurring back to life from its tangle in her scalp. Nails scraping back and then forth, _more, more, show me how sorry you are._ Two fingers push inside, knuckle after knuckle, slowly, slowly crooking up and again, and Dana inhales sharply through her speechlessness with a slow, slow rock of her hips and an arch of her back. _More. More. _Soothing heat like a fire building just beneath the surface. One, and then two, and Chloe’s fingers bottom out.

_More, more, _and Chloe’s lips are at Dana’s navel, smile still there and inching closer to feral satisfaction with every passing second.

_More, more, _and the last drop of air in the room feels gone, vanished somewhere between Dana’s writhing, and touching, and _more, _and _more, _and _more._

Chloe allows herself to be selfish, she allows herself to move in the midst of that more, the steady beat of her fingers unbroken as she ambles up, one leg then the next, returning to the game so rudely interrupted by demands for _more_. Lips against skin, higher, and higher, and higher until Dana is pulling her closer and closer, nails digging into her scalp until Chloe is sinking, blissfully falling forward into the heat of silky fabric, warm skin, and a heart beating fast enough, hot enough, hard enough to drown out the roar of selfish wants — soft, soft, _soft, _just angle your head, just open your mouth, just bite, just a bit, _just a bit — _at the front of her mind with the pulse of a reminder to keep moving, keep touching, keep making sure Dana doesn’t stop making sounds like _that._

If she gets too loud, if _either _of them gets too loud — and Chloe can feel _loud _building like a shotgun blast just beneath the surface — they’ll be caught in an instant. Maybe, maybe, just maybe Chloe might not mind living with the results just for the chance to drown one more piece of forever in the sea of rough, and scratch, and _more, more, more, _but, she _is_ here for a reason. She _is_ here to apologize. And even that selfish, selfish wish to hear Dana scream loud enough to be heard knows enough to understand they haven’t reached anything close to a sorry that matters.

They move together, Chloe and that wish. Higher and higher, kissing and lapping the trail to its finish over collarbones and the taut column of a throat.

Dana wants her closer. Chloe does not listen. She smirks, teeth bared and pressed hard against the frantic pulse beneath Dana’s skin.

Dana wants her closer. Still, Chloe does not listen. She takes her time, kissing lazy little circles up to Dana’s jaw, pausing as she likes to suck, and to nip, and to tease.

Dana wants her closer, and Dana falters, and _whimpers, _and this time, this time, Chloe listens. Dana’s lips crash against her own with entirely too much force, teeth clacking, biting, scratching, a desperate rush to hurt and to help in the midst of swallowing down noises that could be hers, or not, and _more, more, more. _

Chloe moves her fingers hard in their unbroken rhythm, she presses her palm harder between Dana’s legs, and suddenly, suddenly Dana is bucking unsteady against her, coming with a jaw clenched so tight even _she_ can feel the hurt. Suddenly, suddenly, Chloe is letting Dana fall away to quiet herself against the crook of her throat, nails, and hands and broken skin. Legs locking harder, squeezing tighter, and suddenly, suddenly that _more, more, more _reaches a crescendo, bursting into altogether more; into _don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t go, _like a prayer.

Eternity comes and goes before Dana’s grip loosens. When it does, Chloe stumbles back small unsure steps with her freedom and falls straight to the floor, laughing and wiping the slick from her hand. Smiling, and smiling, and smiling at the terrified way Dana watches her go.

“You’re not the first one to knock me on my ass, don’t worry so much,” she says, and it’s the wrong thing to say because this is a moment deeper than most, but it works. It works. Dana laughs, breathy nothings buried behind the back of a palm like _this _is the time or the place to feel embarrassment.

“Well,” she giggles.

“_Well,_” Chloe answers. She leans back, legs stretched out and her weight on her palms. “That seemed like a pretty good apology, if I do say so myself.”

“Mmh.”

“Why _yes, _Chloe, it _was! _Thank you _ever_ so much for making me come by brains out,” Chloe says.

Dana kicks sleepily at one of her knees. It _almost _works.

Chloe at least has the decency to smirk like the devil before she starts up again. “All the way out. Truly amazing job on the sex.”

“Chloe.”

“Three cheers! Three cheers — everybody, three cheers for me. Three cheers for Chloe.”

The next kick is distinctly harder, but all Chloe can manage is to laugh, and laugh, and laugh as she falls the rest of the way to the floor. For a time, for long enough and then longer, that easy, easy peace is their company.

“You’re not getting out of that promise. To tell me everything.”

“Of course not.”

“Chloe — ”

“I promised, Dana.”

It isn’t forgiveness, the way Dana smiles. The way she exhales something that tastes near enough to a laugh. The way she keeps her eyes on Chloe every step of the way as she wriggles herself back to dressed. There’s still far too much to rebuild for that to be true. But it feels close enough.

It isn’t forgiveness, just like Dana towering over her, happy, and sleepy, and satisfied as she says, “_Get up, I’ll drive you to my place,_” isn’t a second chance.

It isn’t.

But it feels close enough.


End file.
